Interaction+Design+Summary

December 1, 2010 Hi, Jeannette and I have worked on the interaction design summary to pare it down. The final version is posted below. We can still make changes later, but let's wait and see what we have with the rest of the paper. Thanks.

**Interaction Design** Preece et al. (2007) describe interaction design as “designing interactive products to support people in their everyday and working lives” (p. xvii) The goal of our interaction design was to articulate and communicate the intended user experience with the Virti-Cue Social Modeling Application. Throughout the interaction design, we took the necessary steps to ensure that our product would be easy, effective, and engaging to use (Preece et al.). A starting point in our work was to consider the feedback from our classmates and instructor on our information design presentation. The ideas of 'cloud storage and retrieval' and a possible 'online, interactive, sharing community of users' became two of the main issues that elicited feedback and discussion. Another aspect of the design that needed clarification was the intended audience, as well as how social stories could be created depicting behaviours that children were not yet capable of performing. Based on feedback during the information design, we took steps to clarify our user group. Although the application is for the benefit of children with Asperger’s syndrome, it will primarily be their parents, caregivers, or teachers who interact with the application and carefully sequence videos and/or images to ‘create’ social interactions that their children are not yet capable of performing in their entirety. A sample social story was written to illustrate the way in which an adult could ‘patch together’ a realistic representation of a targeted behaviour. We began to examine both the conceptual design and the physical design of our application. We considered different colours, icons, and screen layouts that would comply with the needs of our users. We designed the elements of each screen to be clean and clear, allowing for easier navigations (RBWD&UG, p. 45) and reducing the potential for distraction or overstimulation that children with autism often encounter (MacKenzie, 2008). Issues concerning the physical design were discussed and guidelines suggested by Preece et al. (2007) were kept in mind. For example, we considered the way information was to be presented; interactions with the interface; combinations of media to use; the kind of feedback to provide users; and the kind and format of help to provide. In order to assess and evaluate our design, we created an interactive version. As Preece et al. (2007) describe, “interaction design involves interactive products. The most sensible way for users to evaluate such designs, then, is to interact with them. This requires an interactive version of the design to be built” (p. 429). To create an interactive version, we used the Mockingbird online wireframe tool, which reflects the interactive nature of our design. Our intent in creating the mock-up was to get a sense of what it would be like to interact with the product and to gather feedback from potential users. We also wanted to identify problems at an early stage of the design process. As Norman (2004) cautions, “good behavioural design has to be a fundamental part of the design process from the very start; it cannot be adopted once the product has be completed” (p. 83). A user case was created to convey the user experience. Screen shots from the mock-up were captured and incorporated into the user case to create a realistic representation. Screen shots and clipart were also used to create a short video depicting a sample movie that reflected the social story of our user case. The process of creating the mock-up and writing the user case scenario allowed us to carefully examine the layout of screens, ensuring that users would be easily able to find what they were looking for, and “perform tasks in the same sequence an manner across similar conditions” (RBWB&UG, 2007, p. 11). The three main tasks that users may engage in when using Virti-Cue were clarified and detailed in the interaction design: Get Story (to read/view), Edit Stories (that already exist), and create a New Story. As we mapped out the navigated pathways for each of these tasks, we worked to ensure that the choices given to users at each juncture were intuitive and logical. Based on feedback from the information design stage, we carefully laid out the online community and ‘cloud architecture’ aspects of the application. The decision was made to create a ‘tagging’ system for stories that were shared in the cloud, consisting of frequently occurring social scenes, such as sharing, playing with a friend, or asking permission. We also decided to create a filtering system that would serve to flag inappropriate content. Finally, a part of our interaction design was to determine the best platform for our application and the decision was made to exclude laptop and desktop computers while focusing on hand-held devices. This decision was made to ensure the ‘all-in-oneness’ and portability of the application. Although the application is not intended to run on computers at this time, the social stories that are created can be exported from the authoring device and viewed on computers.

REFERENCES MacKenzie, H. (2008). //Reaching and teaching the child with autism spectrum disorder: Using learning preferences and strengths.// London: Jessica Kingsley. Norman, D. (2004). //Emotional design//. New York: Basic Books. Preece, J., Rogers, Y., & Sharp, H. (2007). Interaction design: Beyond human-computer interaction. New York: John Wiley & Sons. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (2007). Research-based web design & usability guidelines. Retrieved from http://www.usability.gov/guidelines/

**Hello all, here is the summary for 'Interaction design', please feel free to add/edit/modify .T ****hanks- ****Vanita **

**Summary: VIRTI-CUE ‘ Interaction Design’ **

(Preece, Rogers, & Sharp, 2002) describe interaction as, ‘designing interactive products to support people in their everyday and working lives’. Our Interaction Design objective is to create an immersive, intuitive and interactive multimedia application designed to meet the sensory needs of children with Asperger’s Syndrome to learn and recognize important social cues in human interactions. To that end, users can create personalized social stories, which allow them to capture authentic social situations that can then be used to rehearse and prepare for enactment in day to day situations. According to Carol Gray (http://www.thegraycenter.org/social-stories/what-are- socialstories), ‘..the goal of a Story™ should never be to change the individual’s behavior, that individual’s improved understanding of events and expectations may lead to more effective responses’. Our application ‘Virti-cue’ incorporates video, images, voice and text. It also provides the users an online  community infrastructure for posting and sharing of social stories and scripts, along with a blog to facilitate an exchange of resources. Further, a Cloud architecture which will enable the user to upload video content and free up precious hard-drive space on their personal devices. In the process of developing the interaction phase of our design we followed the guidelines specified in our course outline. ‘In the process of interaction design, you are turning the flowchart, which shows content and structure (scope and sequence), into a storyboard that shows the pathways and user controls as well’. (EDER 679 Course Outline, Fall 2010). We also considered the usability goals specified by Preece, Rogers, & Sharp and took the necessary steps to ensure that our interactive product is ‘easy to learn, effective to use, and enjoyable from the user’s perspective. It involves optimizing the interactions people have with interactive products to enable them to carry out their activities at work, school, and in everyday life’ (p. 14). In the process of developing an interaction design we investigated the four basic activities described by (Preece, Rogers, & Sharp, 2002, p.12). Essentially the process of interaction design involves the four basic activities. · Identifying needs and establishing requirements. · Developing alternative designs that meet those requirements. · Building interactive versions of the designs so that they can be communicated and assessed. · Evaluating what is being built throughout the process. Hence we first **//identified the user group//** for our application which could be the parents and caregivers of elementary aged children with Asperger’s Syndrome. Other possible users of the application may include ELL Educators, Special Education Teachers, Behaviour Teachers, and Community Rehabilitation Practitioners. Although it is the children who are the ultimate beneficiaries of our application, it will be the adults who orchestrate the process and perform most of the tasks within the application. The requirement and rationale for this decision hinges on two key factors: 1) If the children are the key ‘actors’ in the social scene, they need someone to record images or video of them (i.e. it is difficult to take your own picture). 2) The social scenes that will be created depict behaviours that the children are //not yet// capable of performing on their own. Therefore, it will require careful orchestration by an adult to correctly sequence a number of images and/or video to create that scene (if a child doesn’t know how to enact a social situation, they will have difficulty independently creating that social scene). Thus digital images or video could be used as an alternative in developing the social script. Since our product, ‘Virti-Cue Social Modeling Application’ is a basically a downloadable application, designed to be used on handheld devices, such as smartphones, ipod touches,and ipads, we decided **//to develop an alternative design//** as specified by Preece, Rogers, & Sharp, ‘This is the core activity of designing: actually suggesting ideas for meeting the requirements. This activity can be broken up into two sub-activities: conceptual design and physical design. Conceptual design involves producing the conceptual model for the product, and a conceptual model describes what the product should do, behave and look like. Physical design considers the detail of the product including the colours, sounds, and images to use, menu design, and icon design. (p. 169). At this stage we are actively working and considering different colours, icons etc that would comply with the needs of the users. The colours on each page have been carefully selected so that they will not demand too much attention or be too flashy for our sensitive users; excessive use of colour has been intentionally avoided (Preece, Rogers, & Sharp, 2002). As Myler, Fantacone, & Merritt (2005) note, because autism is marked by "extreme, debilitating sensitivity to sensory stimulation – sound, light, color, and pattern – it becomes of primary importance that schools for autistic children tightly control the amount and kind of visual and aural stimulation that children receive from their environment" (p. 100). The elements of each screen are clean and clear, allowing for easier navigation (RBWD&UG, p. 45) and reducing the potential for distraction or overstimulation that children with autism often encounter(MacKenzie, 2008). We have also incorporated few visuals and those that we have chosen are interesting, yet not distracting. Descriptive text and images will give users choices of available functions. Screen elements have been aligned to promote ease in scanning (RBWD&UG, 2007, p. 51) and to allow users to quickly find and make their selections. We also discussed issues concerning the physical design and kept in mind issues suggested by Preece, Rogers, & Sharp such as : the way information is to be presented and interacted with the interface, what combinations of media to use, the kind of feedback that will be provided, what kind of help to be provide and in what format etc.(p.65). Now in order to assess and evaluate what is being designed, we built an ‘**//interactive version of our design’//**. As Preece, Rogers, & Sharp describe, “Interaction design involves interactive products. The most sensible way for users to evaluate such designs, then, is to interact with them. This requires an interactive version of the designs to be built, but that does not mean that a software version is required’.(p. 169). Since Virti cue is an immersive, intuitive and interactive multimedia application we decided to use ‘mocking bird’ which is also a highly interactive tool and created our interactive prototype. Our intent is now to invite some users in order to get a feedback and to get a real sense of what it will be like to interact with the product. We also wanted to identify the problems at an early stage of development of the design. As Norman (2004) cautions, “Good behavioural design has to be a fundamental part of the design process from the very start; it cannot be adopted once the product has been completed. Behavioural design begins with understanding the users’ needs, ideally derived by conducting studies of relevant behaviour in homes, schools, places of work, or wherever the product will actually be used” (p. 83). <span style="color: #f79646; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">In our model, we used a **User Case** and set three main tasks that users may engage in when using the Virti- Cue Social Scripting Application. RBWB&UG provides some important guidelines to navigation with the most important idea being to allow users to find what they are looking for with ease and to “perform tasks in the same sequence and manner across similar conditions” (p. 11). In accordance with this principle of ‘consistency’, each screen includes ‘Back’ links as well as links to the ‘Home’ screen. Consistently including these navigational buttons on each screen also helps users avoid ‘dead ends’, or ‘orphan pages’ (Preece, Rogers, & Sharp, 2002; RBWD&UG, 2007, p. 59). Our goal is to have the “technology itself become transparent” (Vicente, p. 90), leaving users free to pursue their goals. There are three main tasks that users may engage in when using the Virti-Cue Social Scripting Application: Get Story (to read/view), Edit Stories (that already exist), or create a New Story. In order to ‘Get story’ the user enters a search term, a list of a number of possible stories comes up. The user now decides to pick a story or make a new social story. The user may also choose to get the story from the local device which has a stored sample story. If the user decides to create a new story, the story can be personalized by giving it a name, ‘Adding Picture’. The User can now select ‘Take a Picture’ and by clicking ‘Creating Your Story’ be able to add different elements such as: pictures, movies, text and sound. Once done, the user is given the option to 'Save' or 'Save and Add' to his own device or choose to save on 'the cloud', to free up memory on his device. Filters will be in place on the Virti-Cue site that will flag inappropriate content. Thus with the help of this interactive version of our product we will be able to write down formal, verifiable and measurable goals. ‘The process of writing down formal, verifiable-and hence measurable –usability criteria is a key characteristic of an approach to interaction design called usability engineering that has emerged over many years with various proponents (Whiteside et al., 1988;Neilsen, 1993). <span style="color: #f79646; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">In order to ensure our product is user friendly, as a part of our **research methodology** it is our intent to engage in an iterative design process in which feedback from users is gathered in an ongoing fashion and suggestions for improvement are quickly incorporated into the design. We have incorporated feedback given to us by our peers on our previous presentation on the ‘tagging’ system and in addition to that we have invited some of our family members to use the Virti-Cue Mock-up. We tried to involve 6-8 users to try the Virti-Cue Mock up as we wanted to avoid “Quick and dirty” tests as warned by Preece, Rogers & Sharp (2002). Following their guidelines, we will consider working through the DECIDE framework in doing our user testing in our next session. As Preece, Rogers, & Sharp (2002) note, “working through the DECIDE framework will help you identify the necessary steps for a successful study” (p. 438). In our next session, we shall invite our colleagues to participate in trying our interactive version of the design and through active observation, questionnaire, survey and video-recording after duly taking the user’s consent, we shall further gather information on ‘user-experience’, and ‘ease of use’ which will give us valuable information and feedback to improvise our product.

<span style="color: #f79646; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">REFERENCES:-

<span style="color: #f79646; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 36pt; text-indent: -36pt;">(RBWD&UG). Retrieved from [|http://usability.gov/pdfs/guidelines_ book.pdf] Litras, S., Moore, D., & Anderson, A. (2010). Using video self-modelled social stories to teach social skills to a young child with autism. //Autism Research and Treatment, Volume 2010//, 1-7.doi:10.1155/2010/834979 <span style="color: #f79646; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 36pt; text-indent: -36pt;">MacKenzie, H. (2008). //Reaching and teaching the child with autism spectrum disorder: Using learning preferences and strengths.// London: Jessica Kingsley. <span style="color: #f79646; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 36pt; text-indent: -36pt;">Maione, L., & Mirenda, P. (2006). Effects of video modeling and video feedback on peer- directed social language skills of a child with autism. //Journal of Positive Behavior Interventions, 8//(2), 106-118. doi:10.1177/10983007060080020201 <span style="color: #f79646; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 36pt; text-indent: -36pt;">Myler, P. A., Fantacone, T. A. & Merritt, E. T. (2005). Special ed that’s even more special: Designing schools for autistic students. In E. T. Merritt, J. A. Beaudin, C.R. Cassidy & P.A. Myler (Eds.), //Magnet and specialized schools of the future: A focus on change// (pp. 99-105). Lanham, MA: Scarecrow Education. //The Design of Everyday Things.// New York: Basic Books. <span style="color: #f79646; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 36pt; text-indent: -36pt;">Norman, D. (1988). <span style="color: #f79646; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 36pt; text-indent: -36pt;">Nielsen, J. (1993). //Usability Engineering//. San Fransisco: Morgan Kaufmann. <span style="color: #f79646; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 36pt; text-indent: -36pt;">Preece, J., Rogers, Y., & Sharp, H. (2007). Interaction design: Beyond human-computer interaction.//Interaction Design: Virti-Cue" 18//New York: John Wiley & Sons. <span style="color: #f79646; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt 36pt; text-indent: -36pt;">Vicente, K. (2003). The human factor. Toronto, CA: Alfred A Knopf. <span style="color: #f79646; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt 36pt; text-indent: -36pt;">Whiteside, J. (1988). Usability Enginering: our experience and evolution. In //Handbook of Human-Computer Interaction.// Helender, M. (ed). Amsterdam: Elsevier Science Publishers, 791-817. ...............

F ound this link explaining about 'Cloud Computing' and how it works etc. Thought it might be a good reference for this part of our process. It includes a video on how to set it up too. JJ

http://www.businesslink.gov.uk/bdotg/action/detail?r.s=sc&r.l1=1073861197&r.lc=en&r.l3=1084685982&r.l2=1075422920&type=RESOURCES&itemId=1084688241

Have a lookat this...I think it supports our 'credibilty' and is a neat reference from MIT! It is called, "Storied Navigation" I'm not sure if we have referenced it already?

http://labcast.media.mit.edu/?p=32