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64 Chapter 2 Understanding and conceptualizing interaction

The Workaday World. In the new paradigms mentioned above, the emphasis is
on exploring how technological devices can be linked with each other and digital
information in novel ways that allow people to do things they could not do before.
In contrast, the Workaday World paradigm is driven primarily by conceptual and
mundane concerns. It was proposed by Tom Moran and Bob Anderson (1990),
when working at Xerox PARC. They were particularly concerned with the need to
understand the social aspects of technology use in a way that could be useful for
designers. The Workaday World paradigm focuses on the essential character of the
workplace in terms of people's everyday activities, relationships, knowledge, and
resources. It seeks to unravel the "set of patterns that convey the richness of the
settings in which technologies live-the complex, unpredictable, multiform rela-
tionships that hold among the various aspects of working life" (p. 384).

2.6 From conceptual models to physical design
As we emphasize throughout this book, interaction design is an iterative process. It
involves cycling through various design processes at different levels of detail. Pri-
marily it involves: thinking through a design problem, understanding the user's
needs, coming up with possible conceptual models, prototyping them, evaluating
them with respect to usability and user experience goals, thinking about the design
implications of the evaluation studies, making changes to the prototypes with re-
spect to these, evaluating the changed prototypes, thinking through whether the
changes have improved the interface and interaction, and so on. Interaction design
may also require going back to the original data to gather and check the require-
ments. Throughout the iterations, it is important to think through and understand
whether the conceptual model being developed is working in the way intended and
to ensure that it is supporting the user's tasks.
Throughout this book we describe the way you should go about doing interac-
tion design. Each iteration should involve progressing through the design in more
depth. A first pass through an iteration should involve essentially thinking about
the problem space and identifying some initial user requirements. A second pass
should involve more extensive information gathering about users' needs and the
problems they experience with the way they currently carry out their activities
(see Chapter 7). A third pass should continue explicating the requirements, lead-
ing to thinking through possible conceptual models that would be appropriate (see
Chapter 8). A fourth pass should begin "fleshing out" some of these using a vari-
ety of user-centered methods. A number of user-centered methods can be used to
create prototypes of the potential candidates. These include using storyboarding
to show how the interaction between the users and the system will take place and
the laying out of cards and post-it notes to show the possible structure of and navi-
gation through a website. Throughout the process, the various prototypes of the
conceptual models should be evaluated to see if they meet users' needs. Informally
asking users what they think is always a good starting point (see Chapter 12). A
number of other techniques can also be used at different stages of the develop-
ment of the prototypes, depending on the particular information required (see
Chapters 13 and 14).