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The Seventh Danish HCI Research Symposium

Keynote

Arrangementet er afholdt
(blev afholdt torsdag, 22. november 2007, kl. 8:30-21:00)

An interaction designer's sense of quality

Professor Jonas Löwgren, Malmö University, Sweden

Abstract
The two backbones of proficient design are the abilities to Create and to Assess. To Create is to generate ideas; to Assess is to judge the merits of those ideas. The default assessment approach within HCI is, as always, empirical testing. However, I would argue that significant assessment is going on long before anything testable appears in the design process. One of the things that differentiate more experienced designers from less experienced ones is their ability to assess ideas based on a sense of how they would work out in the hands of users. I suggest that this sense of interaction-design quality can be untangled into concepts describing desirable properties of interactive products and services in different genres. Such properties are called experiential qualities.
In the presentation, I will introduce two such qualities: Pliability and Fluency. Pliability refers to the user's sense of shaping a malleable material, and it is relevant in the design of interactive visualizations. Fluency concerns the gracefulness with which the user can manage multiple demands on attention and action in a mobile setting. Much like a critic in, e.g., architecture, I aim at constructing the experiential quality concepts by combining examples and reasoning. The intention is that they should help other designers develop their assessment ability.