Chapter 2:Understanding and conceptualizing interaction

The two focal points of this chapter were understanding the problem space and conceptualizing the design space. Understanding the problem space is a crucial element to interaction design, and the description seemed pretty self explanatory-- to work around what the user actually needs. The conceptualizing the design space was much more interesting to me.. especially the four fundamental types of interaction that a user can have, including instructing, conversing, manipulating, and instructing:

The section that I found to be the most insightful was the discusssion of the pros and cons of major metaphors and analogies. For example, the analogy of the computer as a desktop with files that can be grouped into folders or thrown away in a trashcan, etc. Of course I understood that the computer uses familiar items so that I could easily understand its functionality, but I had never stepped aside to realize that someone had to have thought of that specific metaphor to use.. these metaphors have always existed in my conscious lifetime and therefore have seemed to become innate to me. Though there are many advantages of using such metaphors, I had never considered the limitations that are linked to them.

This book has described of how interaction is fundamental to the usability success of a product with examples that I have encountered before, and I think that these examples will be helfpul for me to remember those elaborated ideas. I thought that the vending machine and ticket machine examples were well-selected choices to explain how instructing is crucial to the interaction between the user and machine. (The usage of something I encounter everyday proves to me that the writers of these books have made this Interaction Design book user friendly for the reader... and maybe they DO know what they're talking about.) Using the reader's existing knowledge to further expand the ideas has been helpful, such as comparing how IKEA's help center, Ask Jeeve's for Kids, and an insurance company all utilize different modes of conversing.

One idea that stood out to me was the testing of the Chromarium color cubes... "in a study exploring color mixing, it was found that young children (aged 4-6 years) were far more creative, collaborative, and reflexive when mixing colors with the physical-digital cubes... in particular, they explored many more combinations and tried to see if they could change the density of the colors being mixed, for example, by placing the cubes on top of each other and pressing them hard on the table" ( Interaction Design, 71). Using children as the users would help to bring the level of usability down to a basic leven and to explore ways that a narrow minded adult might not think to do. However, a downfall to this would be that some more expertised users may find such a product to be too elementary.

... more to come later :D