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Interaction Design Tools ...

Interaction Design Tools

You can download sheets for user research and concept generation in interaction and service design below. They are PDF-files in A3-format.

The Persona Sheet is a support for data collection during user research and you can use it as a basis for constructing interview questions and observation protocols. It has two parts; one concerns the user and his or her relation to the product domain, and the other concerns the activities users perform in relation to the product domain. You may have to use several sheets in your data collection. The user part is loosely based on the dimensions of personas described by Cooper, Reimann and Cronin (2007), as well as Pruitt & Adlin (2005), and I have included "An Ordinary Day" to make the personas more alive. The activity page is based on the categories in Burke's pentad for human action: Act, Scene, Agent, Agency, Purpose (Burke, 1945; Wertsch, 1998).

The Concept Design Sheet is a response to my students who always ask what we mean by a design concept in interaction and service design. It is supposed to support you to think your design concepts through properly, and it gives direction on what dimensions design concepts can differ from each other. So if you have five design concepts early on in a project, you can describe how they are similar and different based on the various headings in the chart. It also contains a template for a storyboard that you can use to figure out what the usage of the design concept would be like, and how people would interact with it. A good idea is to also explore several different alternative storyboards for each design concept. The Concept Design Sheet is, just like the activity page in the Persona Sheet, based on Burke's pentad. I have also added a specific question that focuses on ethics, and how people and the world are affected by the design, in the short run as well as in the long run (relating to the act-scene ratio in the pentad).