Natural speed please!
In many ways, the most creative, challenging, and under-appreciated aspect of interaction design
is evaluating designs with people.
The insights that you’ll get from testing designs with people
can help you get new ideas, make changes, decide wisely, and fix bugs.
One reason I think design is such an interesting field is its relationship to truth and objectivity.
I find design so incredibly fascinating because we can say more in response to a question like:
“How can we measure success?” than “It’s just personal preference” or “Whatever feels right.”
At the same time, the answers are more complex and more open-ended, more subjective,
and require more wisdom than just a number like 7 or 3.
One of the things that we’re going to learn in this class
is the different kinds of knowledge that you can get out of different kinds of methods.
Why evaluate designs with people? Why learn about how people use interactive systems?
I think one major reason for this is that it can be difficult to tell how good a user interface is
until you’ve tried it out with actual users, and that’s because clients and designers and developers,
they may know too much about the domain and the user interface,
or have acquired blinders through designing and building the user interface.
At the same time they may not know enough about the user’s actual tasks.
And while experience and theory can help, it can still be hard to predict what real users will actually do.
You might want to know, “Can people figure out how to use it?”
or “Do they swear or giggle when using this interface?”
“How does this design compare to that design?”
and, “If we changed the interface, how does that change people’s behaviour?”
“What new practices might emerge?” “How do things change over time?”
These are all great questions to ask about an interface, and each will come from different methods.
