This document discusses teaching interaction design methods at Tallinn University. It provides an overview of an interaction design course, including its structure, projects, and process. The course covers key interaction design topics like personas, scenarios, concept mapping, user stories, paper prototyping, and user interface prototyping. Students work in groups on a project and go through stages of contextual inquiry, ideation, prototyping, and testing. The document also provides examples for creating personas, scenarios, and concept maps to support interaction design.

1. Teaching Interaction Design
Hans Põldoja, Tallinn University

2. Hans Põldoja
Lecturer of educational technology
Tallinn University, Institute of Informatics
Doctoral student
Aalto University, School of Arts, Design and Architecture
hans.poldoja@tlu.ee
http://www.hanspoldoja.net

3. What is interaction design?

4. (IxDA)

5. “Interaction design refers to
the process that is arranged
within the existing resource
constraints to create, shape,
and decide all use-oriented
qualities (structural, functional,
ethical, and aesthetic) of a
digital artifact for one or many
clients.”
(Löwgren & Stolterman, 2007)

6. HCI and Interaction Design
in Tallinn University

7. Interaction Design Methods
course

8. Interaction Design Methods course
https://ifi7156.wordpress.com

9. Structure of the course
• 5 ECTS / 130 hours
• 8 meetings (26 hours)
• work on a group project (80 hours)
• work on individual assignments (8 hours)
• work on literature (16 hours)

10. Types of projects
• Web applications
• Mobile applications
• Content-driven projects

15. Research-based design process
(Leinonen,Toikkanen, & Silfvast, 2008)

16. IxD course
Group
blog
Project
idea
Contextual
inquiry Personas Scenarios
Design
session
Concept
mapping
Testing
tasks
User
stories
Paper
prototypes
Testing the
paper
prototypes
User
interface
prototypes
Feedback Feedback Testing Feedback
Final
presentation
2 weeks 2 weeks 2 weeks 2 weeks 4 weeks 2 weeks
January 30 February 13 February 28 March 27 April 24 May 8
Group Assignments
Individual Assignments
March 13

17. Group
blog
Project
idea
Contextual
inquiry Personas Scenarios
Design
session
Concept
mapping
Testing
tasks
Feedback Feedback
2 weeks 2 weeks 2 weeks 2 we
January 30 February 13 February 28
Group Assignments
Individual Assignments
March 13

18. User
stories
Paper
prototypes
Testing the
paper
prototypes
User
interface
prototypes
Testing Feedback
Final
presentation
2 weeks 4 weeks 2 weeks
March 27 April 24 May 8

19. A real life...
Contextual
inquiry Personas Scenarios
Design
session
Concept
mapping
User
stories
Testing
task
Paper
prototypes
Testing the
paper
prototypes
User
interface
prototypes

20. Personas

21. Cooper, A., Reimann, R., & Cronin, D. (2007). About Face
3: The Essentials of Interaction Design. Indianapolis, IN:
Wiley Publishing, Inc.

22. Persona’s elements
• Photo
• Background info (age, gender, computer, tech skills,
disabilities, ...)
• Goals
• Information seeking styles
• Usability needs
(Cooper, Reimann, & Cronin, 2007)

23. Persona types
• Primary (1)
• Secondary (0...2)
• Supplemental
• Customer
• Served: non-users affected by the use of the product
• Negative
(Cooper et al, 2007)

24. Persona type: Secondary persona
Age: 50
Education: Master in International
Management
Occupation: Teacher
Leena
Leena is a teacher in the Business program. She has been a teachers for a long
time. Show knows how to teach very well and has her own methodology and
routines. She has used all kind of different IT systems while teaching, but still
have a problem putting together her teaching routines with technology. She
sometimes feels she is forced to use the systems, but recognizes the need to
do so in general. She likes her job, but sometimes finds it difficult to navigate
through different intranets and desktops.
Leena is interested in politics and usually reads a paper every morning. She is
specially interested in international politics and economy.
Goals:
Stability: “I don’t want to learn a new IT system very often. I like to know
how things work and then use the functions to get the job done every
semester.”
Efficiency: “When I have 20 people in my class, I would like to be able to
give personalized feedback to all in the shortest amount of time possible. ”
Timeliness: “I would like to get schedules faster. When the information
about scheduling is not there on time, my students complain about this to
me.”
Photo by Timothy Krause,
taken from http://www.flickr.com/photos/33498942@N04/6421896557

25. Background
Goals
Jan is studying at Masaryk University in Brno at Pedagogical Faculty. He
comes from small village, where he lives during weekends and he commutes to
Brno every week, where he shares a flat with other 5 roommates. As a student,
he is financialy supported by his parents, but he tries to participate in some part
time job from time to time to earn some extra money. Because his schedule is
very flexible, he can go out basically any day during the week. He likes to
spend his time either acrively doing some kind of sport or he likes to hang out
with his friends in either pub, bar or disco. In average, he is out 3 times a week.
As an usual student, Jan is very skilful with using computer, since he needs it
every day for purpouses of study or fun. He spends a lot of time on social
networks or searching for information. He has a smartphone, but uses it mainly
for social networking, not for reading or searching webpages.
To be able to find out, where are his friends hanging out tonightŸ
Ÿ
Ÿ
Wants to show other people information about his favourite places and what
he is doing
Wants to be the best among his frineds in user ranking, to show of
Jan Klvaňa
Age and sex
Education
Occupation
: male 23
: Pedagogical Faculty of MU
Brno
: Full-time student, with
casual part time jobs

26. Scenario-based design

27. Carroll, J. M. (2000). Making Use: Scenario-Based Design
of Human-Computer Interactions. Cambridge, MA: The MIT
Press.

28. Scenario 1: First experience with EduFeedr
John is teaching an open online course where he has more than 30
participants. All the participants have their individual blogs where they
publish the weekly assignment. John is using a feed reader to follow all the
student blogs. He is also trying to comment all the posts that have an
inspiring ideas.
In the middle of the course John notices that it becomes increasingly
complicated to manage the course. Several participants are not able to keep
up with the tempo of the course. In the feed reader it is not easy to see
how far different participants have proceeded with the course.
One day John reads about new feed reader EduFeedr that has special features
to support online courses. It an online feed reader similar to Google
Reader. John creates an account and starts exploring the possibilities. He
can easily import all the feeds from his current feed reader.
After importing the feeds he notices that the students’ posts are somehow
grouped by the assignments. This way it is easy to see how far the
participants have proceeded with their work.
It is possible to browse students posts by a tag cloud. Among other tags
there is a tag "urgent". John clicks on the tag and finds out that a few
students who needed fast feedback to proceed with their home task have used
that tag.
There is also an image that displays the social network between the student
blogs. John can see which blogs are more actively linked and commented.
John is impressed by these possibilities. He decides to get a cup of coffee
and explore the other features of EduFeedr.

29. Participatory design sessions
• 2...3 participants and 1 designer
• Structured discussion about 3...4 scenarios
• Prepared questions about the scenarios
• Should not last more than 2 hours

31. Example questions
• Did the scenario wake-up any thoughts?
• Could you image yourself to the role of the teacher?
• Is there something you would like to change in the
scenario?

32. Summarizing the design
sessions
• Written summary based on audio recording or notes
• Concept map

33. Concept mapping

34. Novak, J. D. (2010). Learning, Creating, and Using
Knowledge: Concept Maps as Facilitative Tools in Schools
and Corporations. New York, NY: Routledge.

35. Role in interaction design
• Summarizing design sessions
• Establishing user interface vocabulary
• Building a common understanding in a project team
• Providing input for information architecture

36. (Põldoja &Väljataga, 2010)

37. (Põldoja et al, 2011)

38. User stories

39. Cohn, M. (2004). User stories applied: For agile software
development. Boston, MA: Addison-Wesley.

40. User story format
"As a <role>, I want <goal/desire>”
Example:
Search for customers
As a user, I want to search for my customers by their first
and last names.

42. Prototyping

43. Prototyping techniques
• Low-fidelity prototyping
• Paper prototyping
• Wireframes
• High-fidelity prototyping
• Graphical prototypes
• HTML/CSS prototypes

44. Snyder, C. (2003). Paper prototyping: The fast and easy
way to design and refine user interfaces. San Francisco,
CA: Morgan Kaufmann.

45. Initial user story

47. Improved user story

51. Detailed UI prototypes

52. Pencil
http://pencil.evolus.vn

53. Axure
http://www.axure.com/edu

54. InVision
http://www.invisionapp.com

55. Human-Computer
Interaction master
programme

56. HCI master programme
http://hci.tlu.ee

58. Practice
(4 credits)
Evaluating the User Experience
(5 credits)
Interaction Design Methods
(5 credits)
Developing Interactive Systems
(5 credits)
Master Thesis Seminar
(4 credits)
Research Methods
(4 credits)

59. Hands-on activity: Paper
prototyping

60. Context: redesigning the
thesis topic database

61. Thesis topic database in TLU
http://www.cs.tlu.ee/teemaderegister/

62. Prototypes
• Thesis topic page
• Supervisor page
• Curriculum page

63. References
• IxDA (n.d.). IxDA Mission. Retrieved from http://www.ixda.org/about/ixda-
mission
• Leinonen, T., Toikkanen, T., & Silvfast, K. (2008). Software as Hypothesis:
Research-Based Design Methodology. In Proceedings of the Tenth
Anniversary Conference on Participatory Design 2008 (pp. 61–70).
Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University.
• Löwgren, J., & Stolterman, E. (2007). Thoughtful Interaction Design: A Design
Perspective on Information Technology. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

64. Thank You!
• hans.poldoja@tlu.ee
• http://www.slideshare.net/hanspoldoja