Interactive systems are increasingly interconnected across different devices and platforms. The challenge for interaction designers is to meet the requirements of consistency and continuity across these platforms to ensure the inter-usability of the system. This presentation describes the current challenges the designers are facing in the emerging fields of interactive systems. Through semi-structured interviews of 17 professionals working on interaction design in different domains we probed into the current methodologies and the practical challenges in their daily tasks. The identified challenges include but are not limited to: the inefficiency of using low-fi prototypes in a lab environment to test inter-usability and the challenges of “seeing the big picture” when designing a part of an interconnected system.

1. Designing Inter-usable
Systems

2. SmarcoS
• SmarcoS project aims to help users
of interconnected systems by ensuring their inter-
usability
• Partners from
– Netherlands, UK,
Finland, Belgium,
Czech Rep., Italy
and Spain
www.smarcos-project.eu

3. Outline of the talk
• Challenges in designing inter-usable systems
• Motivation
• Research approach
• Findings
• Approaching the challenges: Prototyping inter-
usability
• Requirements
• Key functionalities

4. Challenges in Designing
Inter-usable Systems
Ville Antila, VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, Oulu, Finland
Alfred Lui, Fjord, London, UK

5. Inter-usability
• Usability research and user interface solutions beyond
individual devices and services
• Usability across the different user interfaces of a given system
(including inter-device interactions)

6. Challenges in Designing
Inter-usable Systems

7. Challenges
• The amount and diversification of computing devices is
increasing and they are becoming more and more connected

8. Challenges
• Users expect to have access to the same applications and
services with a number of different devices

9. Challenges
• Products are becoming increasingly ubiquitous systems; “hybrids
of hardware, software and services” *Kuniavsky]

10. Research questions
• What are the current challenges the
designers are facing?
• Are the methods and tools they use
sufficient (in the changing product
market)?

11. Answering the
Research Questions…

12. Research approach
• To identify some of the current challenges we carried out
semi-structured interviews with 17 professionals from 10
different organizations (4 countries)
• Organizations: from consumer product manufacturers to small
design firms and start-ups
• Interviewees: 6 interaction designers, 4 researchers (UCD), 2
freelance designers, and 3 founders of start-ups, 1 application
engineer and 1 technical director
• Selection criterion: the products which they work on are on the
selected problem domain and that the work field is related or close
iteration with interaction design or usability research

13. Findings
Development environment constraints
“There are component libraries and design
guidelines between product families, but these
Domain restrictions do not go all the way into the ‘tools’ –level. It
would be useful to share the same common
“Many of our product users work in an
tools with developers to avoid the usual
environment where installation of new
challenge ‘this cannot be implemented on this
software or packages on their
platform’”
computers is restricted, for example by
hospital IT departments. We have to Interaction designer, UI designs for mobile and
Web-based applications
work within these restrictions. For that
reason we choose web based solutions Acquiring domain knowledge and
for most of our projects because it user feedback
does not require installation of “A lot of the things we are
software on the [devices] of the users” changing, we will do more of a […]
Application engineer, user interfaces we put it out there and see if
for applications in the domain of people are using it, we don’t
healthcare spend that time doing a full
usability type of thing. Moving
Targeting multiple platforms
towards what the ‘Google model’
“As [the application] must run on several devices, is like, they almost put up the lab
and the devices have different capabilities in terms version or they have a beta
of display and user controls, it is difficult to design a version and people just use it, get
UI that can be used as fast and easy on all the the feedback and just improve it.”
devices.” Co-founder of a start-up on
Technical director, mobile and ubiquitous gaming professional sports tracking
applications technology

14. Analysis
Process phase Identified challenges
Early phase Hard to evaluate concepts without functional prototypes (simulation of
interactive system)
Seeing the big picture when designing a part of a interconnected service
(often designers just focus on part of the system which can create
inconsistencies and discontinuities between the parts)
Development None of the tools available today is sufficient to build and test inter-
phase usable systems
Basic tools such as IDEs, Flash and PCB design tools are generic enough to
fill the gap but by no means efficient for designers who want to weave
digital data into physical materials
Each failed experiment with physical objects incurs material, labor and
transportation costs (unlike with fully digital products/services)
Evaluation phase User testing of embedded devices and interconnected services using low-
fi prototypes in a lab environment is inefficient
Difficult to evaluate the whole (interconnected) system; evaluation of
separated parts does not necessarily correspond to good overall (inter)
usability

15. Implications
Identified need Requirements for methods and tools
Support for “seeing the big Early prototyping through simulation
picture” – how the design fits in Evaluation metrics to test consistency (semantic and
the whole system syntactic) and continuity in cross-platform and cross-device
interactions
Integration between design Ability to test or “mash-up” the composition of
and development tools interconnected systems (e.g. distribution and composition of
functionalities between the cloud and dedicated devices)
Support for rapid prototyping
Refinement of evaluation Evaluation methods and metrics to support inter-usability,
methods and metrics to test taking into account both the composition of functionalities
inter-usability and the continuity of interaction
Design guidelines to support semantic consistency across
platforms (the use of metaphors etc.)
Ability to use efficiency measures to validate inter-usability
of cross-platform interactions

16. Discussion
• More questions than answers really …

17. Discussion
• More questions than answers really …
• Various fields and types of products, hard to
generalize the findings

18. Discussion
• More questions than answers really …
• Various fields and types of products, hard to
generalize the findings
• But…
• Common challenges in
1. dealing with complexity of systems
2. support for various devices
3. lack of tool support to deal with these challenges
(e.g. prototyping tools/ design tools)
4. lack of metrics to evaluate the usability across the
system (e.g. between devices)

19. Needs to address
• Design phase: need for rapid prototyping tools
especially taking into account system complexity, such
as interaction through various devices

20. Needs to address
• Design phase: need for rapid prototyping tools
especially taking into account system complexity, such
as interaction through various devices
• “Difficult to acknowledge the full interaction with the
system when you are designing for a small part of it…”
• How to prototype the “full system” in an early stage
• How to translate that design into the reality (right way
of delivering/documenting the design to product
development)

21. Needs to address
• Evaluation phase: need for metrics to test and
evaluate “inter-usability” of a system

22. Needs to address
• Evaluation phase: need for metrics to test and
evaluate “inter-usability” of a system
• e.g. the role of different devices in the system, how the
information flows, which devices are available in
different situations?
• what are the important measures which determine the
success/ ease of use for the product or service across
devices?

23. Conclusions
• There’s a multitude of (interactive) computing devices
out there and that number not likely to decrease
• Devices themselves no longer offer standardized
means of manipulating information
• Information is everywhere (i.e. accessible from
everywhere)
• There is a need to acknowledge the fragmentation of
information appliances and the different roles of
devices in accessing information, anywhere at
anytime
• Need for tools and metrics to design and evaluate
these systems

24. Approaching the Challenges:
Prototyping Inter-usability

25. Why prototyping?
• Widely accepted means of exploring designs for interactive
computer artifacts [1]
• Division to role, look-and-feel or implementation
prototypes (depending on the factor that the
prototype prototypes)
• Common categories are also: proof-of-concept
prototype, form study prototype, user experience
prototype, visual prototype and functional prototype
[1] Houde, S., Hill, C., What do Prototypes Prototype?, in Handbook of
Human-Computer Interaction, 1997

26. Requirements for the Prototyping tool
(1/2)
• To approach a prototyping challenge we
should work towards a design
environment where inter-usability can be
tested
• In such environment we should be
concentrating on how to design, test and
analyze inter-usability on a given system

27. Requirements for the Prototyping tool
(2/2)
• Support for design thinking by integration of
design, test and analysis of inter-usability
From Hartmann, B., et al., Reflective Physical Prototyping through
Integrated Design, Test and Analysis, UIST’06, 2006

28. Future work
• Research questions
• How to rapidly prototype an ”interconnected” system
• How to provide and maintain awareness of the whole
system behaviour
• Approach: rapid prototyping and simulation of system
behaviour
• How does a change in a part of the system effect the
other parts?
• What kind of logical rules should the system follow?
What should happen and when?
• What input and output devices can be used, when and
how?

29. Thank you!
Questions?