Week 5

• Affinity diagramming


  Process of organizing data by affinity to identify key problems and areas for design intervention
• Representing users


  Involves understanding the problem space, building empathy, and considering different forms of use, contexts, and situations
• Design representations


  Tools and outcomes produced in various design stages to manage complexity, e.g., personas and future use scenarios
• Limitations of representations


  • They are provisional and evolve during the design process, differing from actual entities
• Personas


  Fictional characters created by designers based on research insights to represent user types
• Headers


  Labels capturing the essence of themes among findings in affinity diagramming
• General themes


  Sorting findings into themes during the affinity diagramming process
• Findings


  Keywords, short sentences, and quotes extracted in affinity diagramming
• Mental models


  Internal images of how the world works, used in designing systems to match users' existing knowledge
• Usability principle


  A principle that aims to reduce cognitive load and maintain consistency in design
• User familiarity


  Incorporating terms and concepts familiar to the target users in the interface design
• Conceptual models


  Ideal 'mental models' of a system's function that shape users' understanding through design and usability principles
• Interaction types


  • Instructing
  • Conversing
  • Manipulating
  • Exploring
• Direct manipulation


  Interaction type good for 'doing types of tasks' like designing and drawing
• Issuing instructions


  Interaction type suitable for repetitive tasks such as spell-checking
• Having a conversation


  Interaction type beneficial for people with accessibility needs and computer-phobic individuals like SIRI users