Interactive Narrative

The Ballad of Love and Hate: Music and Lyrics by the Avett Brothers

map of the labyrinth

title sequence

Chapter 3 Reading

The Elements of Interaction Design:

• Motion: The way that products behave in response to the way people behave; motion is often a trigger for action; without motion there can be no interaction.
• Space: Provides a context for motion; all interaction takes place in a space.
• Time: The rhythm of the interaction. (digital time is not equal to human time)
• Appearance: Provides indication of how to interact with an object, often implies emotional context.
• Texture: The sensation of an object can provide clues as to how it is to be used, as well as when and where.

The Laws of Interaction Design:

• Moore's Law: Designers can conceive of devices that are faster, smaller and more powerful than could have feasibly been considered before. (Basically technology is always getting getting better)
• Fitt's Law: The time it takes to move from a starting position determined by the distance to the target and the size of the target.
• Hick's Law: States that the time it take for users to make decisions is determined by the number of possible choices they have.
• Magical Number 7: The human mind is best able to remember information in chunks of seven items, plus or minus two.
• Tesler's Law: There is a point beyond which you can't simplify a process any further. Therefore designers substitute processes that have elements that can't be simplified. "Share the burden of complexity"
• Poka-Yoke Principle: "proofing-avoiding" Preventing problems from occurring in the first place, by putting constraints on products.
• Direct and Indirect Manipulation: 2 ways of interacting with digital objects. Directly: closely mapped to our physical experience. Indirectly: use a command or menu that isn't a part of the digital object to alter that object.
• Feedback and Feedforward: feedback-some indication that an action has succeeded; feedforward-knowing what will happen before you perform an action.

Characteristics of Good Interaction Design:

• Trustworthy: If users trust that a tool can do the job required, they are more likely to deeply engage with it.
• Appropriate: Solutions have to be appropriate to the culture, situation, and context they live in.
• Smart: Tools need to be smarter than us to accomplish a task we cannot do ourselves.
• Responsive: Good design provides a mechanism  to let the user know that the system has heard the request and is doing something about it. (provides feedback)
• Clever:  Clever products and services predict their users needs and fulfill those needs unexpectedly.
• Ludic: Providing the environment and means for users to play with a product or service; users need to feel relaxed instead of trapped.
• Pleasurable: "Beautiful products work better" BUT for a product or service to be appealing it has to work well.

Craigslist Redesign: Jan Tschichold

Chapter 2: Four Approaches to Interaction Design

User Centered Design or UCD:

• UCD focuses on user needs and goals, where user data is the determining factor in making design decisions.
• This approach is best at getting designers to move away from their own preferences, and instead focus on  the needs and goals of the users.
• Follows the philosophy of "User knows best."

Activity Centered Design or ACD:

• ACD focuses on the tasks and activities that need to be accomplished, rather than the goals and preferences of users.
• Activity Theory states that people create tools as a result of "exteriorized" mental processes: creating the tool to support the task.
• *ACD Danger*
• "You'll get a different result if you set out to design a vase instead of something to hold flowers."

Systems Design:

• Systems Design is an analytical approach to design that focusses on the components of a system.
• The user is de-emphasized in favor of the context, but the designer doesn't discount discount user goals and needs.

Genius Design:

• Relies almost solely on the wisdom and experience of the designer to  make decisions.
• The approach best used by experinced designers.

"Jeff Hawkins, the creator of the Palm Pilot, spent most of his budget for the project on development and production of the product and had limited time for user research."