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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.
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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
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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
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& 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.
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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
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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xii
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
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