Chapter 2:

Understanding and
conceptualizing interaction
 Recap
• HCI has moved beyond designing interfaces
for desktop machines
• Concerned with extending and supporting all
manner of human activities
• Designing for user experiences, including:
• Making work effective, efficient and safer
• Improving and enhancing learning and training
• Providing enjoyable and exciting entertainment
• Enhancing communication and understanding
• Supporting new forms of creativity and expression
Understanding the problem
space

– What do you want to create?

– What are your assumptions?
– What are your claims?
– Will it achieve what you hope it will?
If so, how?
 A framework for analysing
the problem space

How
Is there Why How (new user
any (there are (your idea experience
problems? problems)? will help)? will be
achieved)?
 An example
• What do you think were the main
assumptions made by developers
of online photo sharing and
management applications, like
Flickr?
 From problem space to
design space
• Having a good understanding of the
problem space can help inform the design
space
– e.g., what kind of interface, behaviour,
functionality to provide

• But before deciding upon these it is

important to develop a conceptual model
 Conceptual model
• Need to first think about how the system will
appear to users
• (i.e. how they will understand it)

• A conceptual model is:

“a high-level description of how a system is
organized and operates.” (Johnson and Henderson,
2002, p. 26)

• Not a description of the user interface but a

structure outlining the concepts and the
relationships between them
 What is and why need a
conceptual model?
• Why not start with the nuts and bolts of
design?
– Architects and interior designers would not think
about which color curtains to have before deciding
where the windows will be placed in a new building
– Enables “designers to straighten out their thinking
before they start laying out their widgets” (p. 28)
– Provides a working strategy and a framework of
general concepts and their interrelations
 Helps the design team
• Orient themselves towards asking
questions about how the conceptual
model will be understood by users
• Not to become narrowly focused early
on
• Establish a set of common terms they
all understand and agree upon
• Reduce the chance of
misunderstandings and confusion
arising later on
 Main components
• Major metaphors and analogies
– used to convey how to understand what a
product is for and how to use it for an activity.
• Concepts that users are exposed to
through the product
• The relationships between the concepts
– e.g., one object contains another
• The mappings between the concepts and
the user experience the product is
designed to support
 A classic conceptual model: the
spreadsheet
• Analogous to ledger
sheet
• Interactive and
computational
• Easy to understand
• Greatly extending
what accountants
and others could do

www.bricklin.com/history/refcards.htm
 Why was it so good?
• It was simple, clear, and obvious to the
users how to use the application and
what it could do
• “it is just a tool to allow others to work
out their ideas and reduce the tedium of
repeating the same calculations.”
• capitalized on user’s familiarity with
ledger sheets
• Got the computer to perform a range of
different calculations and recalculations
in response to user input
 Another classic
• 8010 Star office system targeted at
workers not interested in computing per
se
• Spent several person-years at
beginning working out
the conceptual model
• Simplified the electronic world, making
it seem more familiar, less alien, and
easier to learn
Johnson et al (1989)
The Star interface
 Interface metaphors
• Designed to be similar to a physical entity but
also has own properties
– e.g. desktop metaphor, search engine
• Exploit user’s familiar knowledge, helping
them to understand ‘the unfamiliar’
• Conjures up the essence of the unfamiliar
activity, enabling users to leverage of this to
understand more aspects of the unfamiliar
functionality
• People find it easier to learn and talk about
what they are doing at the computer interface
in terms familiar to them
 Benefits of interface
metaphors
• Makes learning new systems easier
• Helps users understand the
underlying conceptual model
• Can be innovative and enable the
realm of computers and their
applications to be made more
accessible to a greater diversity of
users
 Interaction types
• Instructing
– issuing commands using keyboard and function keys
and selecting options via menus
• Conversing
– interacting with the system as if having a conversation
• Manipulating
– interacting with objects in a virtual or physical space by
manipulating them
• Exploring
– moving through a virtual environment or a physical
space
 Summary points
• Need to have a good understanding of the problem space
– specifying what it is you are doing, why, and how it will
support users in the way intended
• A conceptual model is a high-level description of a
product
– what users can do with it and the concepts they need to
understand how to interact with it
• Decisions about conceptual design should be made
before commencing any physical design
• Interface metaphors are commonly used as part of a
conceptual model
 Summary points
• Interaction types (e.g., conversing,
instructing) provide a way of thinking about
how best to support the activities users will be
doing when using a product or service