Interaction Types

Interaction types are the ways a person interacts with a product (Rogers, Sharp, & Preece, 2012, p. 46). There are four different types of interactions: instructing, conversing, manipulating, and exploring. Instructing is how users carry out tasks in a system by giving it commands to follow (Rogers, Sharp, & Preece, 2012, p. 47).

Reflections

I use instructing interactions almost constantly. As an IT analyst for a pharmacy it is my job to maintain pharmacy specific software and data. Right now, I am working on data collection, transferring it from our current health information system to excel spreadsheets to be uploaded into our new information system. As I use Microsoft Excel I often add rules to highlight certain cells only if I have edited the data in them so other users can see what needs to be updated. Adding such a rule is instructing the program to perform a task based on conditions. Utilizing this allows me to highlight data without having to do it manually.

Thoughts

Interaction type is important to consider while designing applications. Through studying what instructions users typically use most we can add tasks that are automatically carried out in the background to add a better user experience. Since users frequently save their work so they don’t lose any data they have input most Microsoft Office products are now equipped with autosave. Documents and spreadsheets are automatically saved to the hard drive periodically so that the user doesn’t have to stop data entry to do it manually.

References

Rogers, Y., Sharp, H., & Preece, J. (2012). Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Robotic Sweeper Enhancements

I recently watched “iRobot Roomba 980: A Week with Review” on YouTube. This vlog documented life with a robotic sweeper for a week. This model comes with an app that allows the user to set up a cleaning schedule or start the Roomba whenever you want. This is probably my favorite thing about new tech toys. There’s little handling of the robot needed to get it to do its job. The first thing I noticed while watching this is that the bin that it traps debris in has to be emptied frequently, but that decreased over time since the robot kept the floors clean and there were fewer debris to pick up. Another thing I noticed is that it was quite loud, as loud as my upright vacuum cleaner. It takes a lot longer for it to clean the floors than doing it manually would so this would be very distracting to me if I were trying to get work done or take a nap. All in all, I think this is a neat little tool to help reduce house work for someone who is rather busy (Williams, 2016). In order for it to be ...
Read more

Evaluation Thoughts

“Evaluation is integral to the design process. Evaluators collect information about users’ or potential users’ experiences when interacting with a prototype, a computer system, a component of a computer system, an application, or a design artifact such as a screen sketch. They do this to improve its design. Evaluation focuses on both the usability of the system…and on the users’ experience when interacting with the system” (Rogers, Sharp, & Preece, 2012). Reflections Interaction design as a whole is truly focused on the end user experience. Every aspect comes back around to whether or not the user can utilize the product effectively and with ease. Evaluation expounds upon product usability observation and helps engineers and designers determine what aspects of the product needs improvement and what they got right with the initial design. Thoughts As we have been working on developing our new health information system evaluation has been key in helping decide which applications ...
Read more

Thoughts on Usability Testing

“The usability of products has traditionally been tested in controlled laboratory settings. This approach emphasizes how usable a product is. It has been most commonly used to evaluate desktop applications, such as websites, word processors, and search tools. Doing usability testing in a laboratory, or a temporarily assigned controlled environment, enables evaluators to control what users do and to control environmental and social influences that might impact users’ performance. The goal is to test whether the product being developed is usable by the intended user population to achieve the tasks for which it was designed” (Rogers, Sharp, & Preece, 2012). Thoughts  As my team and I conducted our initial usability test for accessing the audit worksheet for the BS in Information Technology on Middle Georgia State University’s website, we discovered that our users had a difficult time finding it in a timely manner. This led to the users becoming frustrated with the website and a...
Read more