Alan Cooper, Robert Reinmann, David Cronin - About Face 3- The Essentials of Interaction Design (pdf) Read online




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  About Face 3

  The Essentials of

  Interaction Design

  Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann, and Dave Cronin

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  About Face 3

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  About Face 3

  The Essentials of

  Interaction Design

  Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann, and Dave Cronin

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  About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design

  Published by

  Wiley Publishing, Inc.

  10475 Crosspoint Boulevard

  Indianapolis, IN 46256

  www.wiley.com

  Copyright © 2007 Alan Cooper

  Published by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  ISBN: 978-0-470-08411-3

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise, except as permitted under Sections 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222

  Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750-8400, fax (978) 646-8600. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Legal Department, Wiley Publishing, Inc., 10475 Crosspoint Blvd., Indianapolis, IN 46256, (317) 572-3447, fax (317) 572-4355, or online at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.

  Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: The publisher and the author make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this work and specifically disclaim all warranties, including without limitation warranties of fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales or promotional materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for every situation. This work is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering legal, accounting, or other professional services. If professional assistance is required, the services of a competent professional person should be sought. Neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for damages arising here-from. The fact that an organization or Website is referred to in this work as a citation and/or a potential source of further information does not mean that the author or the publisher endorses the information the organization or Website may provide or recommendations it may make. Further, readers should be aware that Internet Websites listed in this work may have changed or disappeared between when this work was written and when it is read.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

  Cooper, Alan, 1952-

  About face 3 : the essentials of interaction design / Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann, and Dave Cronin.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-0-470-08411-3 (pbk.)

  1. User interfaces (Computer systems) 2. Human-computer interaction. I. Reimann, Robert. II. Cronin, Dave, 1972- III. Title. IV. Title: About face three.

  QA76.9.U83C6596 2007

  005.4’38--dc22

  2007004977

  Trademarks: Wiley, the Wiley logo, and related trade dress are trademarks or registered trademarks of John Wiley

  & Sons, Inc. and/or its affiliates, in the United States and other countries, and may not be used without written permission. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Wiley Publishing, Inc., is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book.

  Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.

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  For Sue, my best friend through all the adventures of life.

  For Maxwell Aaron Reimann.

  For Gretchen.

  And for Cooperistas past, present, and future;

  and for those visionary IxD practitioners who

  have helped create a new design profession.

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  About the Authors

  Alan Cooper is a pioneering software inventor, programmer, designer, and theorist.

  He is credited with having produced “probably the first serious business software for microcomputers” and is well known as the “Father of Visual Basic.” For the last 15 years his software design consulting company, Cooper, has helped many companies invent new products and improve the behavior of their technology. At Cooper, Alan led the development of a new methodology for creating successful software that he calls the Goal-Directed process. Part of that effort was the invention of personas, a practice that has been widely adopted since he first published the technique in his second book, The Inmates are Running the Asylum, in 1998. Cooper is also a well known writer, speaker, and enthusiast for humanizing technology.

  Robert Reimann has spent the past 15 years pushing the boundaries of digital products as a designer, writer, lecturer, and consultant. He has led dozens of interaction design projects in domains including e-commerce, portals, desktop productivity, authoring environments, medical and scientific instrumentation, wireless, and handheld devices for startups and Fortune 500 clients alike. As director of design R&D at Cooper, Reimann led the development and refinement of many of the Goal-Directed Design methods described in About Face. In 2005, Reimann became the first President of IxDA, the Interaction Design Association (www.ixda.org), a global nonprofit professional organization for Interaction Designers. He is currently manager of user experience at Bose Corporation.

  Dave Cronin is the director of interaction design at Cooper, where he’s helped design products to serve the needs of people such as surgeons, museum visitors, marketers, investment portfolio managers, online shoppers, hospital staff, car drivers, dentists, financial analysts, manufacturing planners, the elderly, and the infirm. At Cooper, he has also contributed substantially to the ongoing process of developing and refining the Goal-Directed Design methods described in this book.

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  Credits

  Executive Editor

  Graphics and Production Specialists

  Chris Webb

  Sean Decker, Brooke Graczyk,

  Stephanie D. Jumper,

  Development Editors

  Jennifer Mayberry, Barbara Moore,

  Sara Shlaer

  Ronald Terry

  Sydney Jones

  Quality Control Technician

  Production Editor

  Christy Pingleton

  Eric Charbonneau

  Book Designers

  Copy Editor

  Rebecca Bortman and Nick Myers

  Foxxe Editorial Services
r />   Illustrators

  Editorial Manager

  Rebecca Bortman and Nick Myers

  Mary Beth Wakefield

  Proofreading and Indexing

  Production Manager

  Aptara

  Tim Tate

  Anniversary Logo Design

  Vice President and Executive Group

  Richard Pacifico

  Publisher

  Richard Swadley

  Cover Design

  Rebecca Bortman and Nick Myers

  Vice President and Executive

  Publisher

  Joseph B. Wikert

  Project Coordinator

  Erin Smith

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  Contents

  About the Authors

  vi

  Foreword: The Postindustrial World

  xxi

  Acknowledgments

  xxv

  Introduction to the Third Edition

  xxvii

  Part I

  Understanding Goal-Directed Design

  1

  Chapter 1

  Goal-Directed Design

  3

  Digital Products Need Better Design Methods

  3

  The creation of digital products today

  4

  Why are these products so bad?

  8

  The Evolution of Design in Manufacturing

  11

  Planning and Designing Behavior

  13

  Recognizing User Goals

  13

  Goals versus tasks and activities

  15

  Designing to meet goals in context

  16

  The Goal-Directed Design Process

  17

  Bridging the gap

  18

  A process overview

  20

  Goals, not features, are the key to product success

  25

  Chapter 2

  Implementation Models and Mental Models

  27

  Implementation Models

  27

  User Mental Models

  28

  Represented Models

  29

  Most Software Conforms to Implementation Models

  32

  User interfaces designed by engineers follow the implementation model 32

  Mathematical thinking leads to implementation model interfaces

  34

  Mechanical-Age versus Information-Age Represented Models

  35

  Mechanical-Age representations

  35

  New technology demands new representations

  36

  Mechanical-Age representations degrade user interaction

  36

  Improving on Mechanical-Age representations: An example

  37

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  x

  Contents

  Chapter 3

  Beginners, Experts, and Intermediates

  41

  Perpetual Intermediates

  42

  Designing for Different Experience Levels

  44

  What beginners need

  45

  Getting beginners on board

  46

  What experts need

  47

  What perpetual intermediates need

  47

  Chapter 4

  Understanding Users: Qualitative Research

  49

  Qualitative versus Quantitative Research

  50

  The value of qualitative research

  50

  Types of qualitative research

  52

  Ethnographic Interviews: Interviewing and Observing Users

  58

  Contextual inquiry

  58

  Improving on contextual inquiry

  59

  Preparing for ethnographic interviews

  59

  Conducting ethnographic interviews

  63

  Other Types of Research

  68

  Focus groups

  69

  Market demographics and market segments

  69

  Usability and user testing

  70

  Card sorting

  72

  Task analysis

  72

  Chapter 5

  Modeling Users: Personas and Goals

  75

  Why Model?

  76

  Personas

  77

  Strengths of personas as a design tool

  78

  Personas are based on research

  80

  Personas are represented as individual people

  81

  Personas represent groups of users

  82

  Personas explore ranges of behavior

  83

  Personas must have motivations

  83

  Personas can also represent nonusers

  84

  Personas and other user models

  84

  When rigorous personas aren’t possible: Provisional personas

  86

  Goals

  88

  Goals motivate usage patterns

  88

  Goals should be inferred from qualitative data

  88

  User goals and cognitive processing

  89

  The three types of user goals

  92

  User goals are user motivations

  94

  Types of goals

  94

  Successful products meet user goals first

  96

  Constructing Personas

  97

  Step 1: Identify behavioral variables

  98

  Step 2: Map interview subjects to behavioral variables

  99

  Step 3: Identify significant behavior patterns

  99

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  Contents

  xi

  Step 4: Synthesize characteristics and relevant goals

  100

  Step 5: Check for completeness and redundancy

  101

  Step 6: Expand description of attributes and behaviors

  102

  Step 7: Designate persona types

  104

  Other Models

  106

  Workflow models

  106

  Artifact models

  107

  Physical models

  107

  Chapter 6

  The Foundations of Design: Scenarios and Requirements

  109

  Scenarios: Narrative as a Design Tool

  110

  Scenarios in design

  111

  Using personas in scenarios

  112

  Different types of scenarios

  112

  Persona-based scenarios versus use cases

  113

  Requirements: The “What” of Interaction Design

  114

  Requirements Definition Using Personas and Scenarios

  115

  Step 1: Creating problem and vision statements

  116

  Step 2: Brainstorming

  117

  Step 3: Identifying persona expectations

  118

  Step 4: Constructing context scenarios

  119

  Step 5: Identifying requirements

  122

  Chapter 7

  From Requirements to Design: The Framework

  and Refinement

  125

  The Design Framework

  125

  Defining the interaction framework

  127

  Defining the visual design framework

  136

  Defining the indust
rial design framework

  139

  Refining the Form and Behavior

  141

  Design Validation and Usability Testing

  142

  When to test: Summative and formative evaluations

  144

  Conducting formative usability tests

  144

  Designer involvement in usability studies

  145

  Part II

  Designing Behavior and Form

  147

  Chapter 8

  Synthesizing Good Design: Principles and Patterns

  149

  Interaction Design Principles

  150

  Principles operate at different levels of detail

  150

  Behavioral and interface-level principles minimize work

  151

  Design Values

  151

  Ethical interaction design

  152

  Purposeful interaction design

  153

  Pragmatic interaction design

  154

  Elegant interaction design

  154

  Interaction Design Patterns

  156

  Architectural patterns and interaction design

  156

  Recording and using interaction design patterns

  157

  Types of interaction design patterns

  158

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  Contents

  Chapter 9

  Platform and Posture

  161

  Posture

  162

  Designing Desktop Software

  163

  Designing for the Web

  174

  Informational Web sites

  175

  Transactional Web sites

  177

  Web applications

  178

  Internet-enabled applications

  181

  Intranets

  181

  Other Platforms

  182

  General design principles

  182

  Designing for handhelds

  189

  Designing for kiosks

  191

  Designing for television-based interfaces

  195

  Designing for automotive interfaces

  197

  Designing for appliances

  198

  Designing for audible interfaces

  199

  Chapter 10 Orchestration and Flow

  201