Challenges in Designing Inter-usable Systems

Abstract

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. In this paper we investigate 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.

Understanding the Challenges of Designing and Developing Multi-Device Experiences

“…More recently (pre-2011), Antila and Lui [1] interviewed seventeen professionals whose work included "components, which are interconnected with some level of measured usability." Based on those interviews they identified four challenges.…”

“…1. Prior work focused mainly on the (still important) challenge of designing UIs that are consistent across devices that have very different input and output capabilities (e.g., [1,11]). We found this challenge was complicated by the additional tension between following native UI standards imposed by platform vendors (e.g., Google's Material Design 2 and Apple's Flat Design 3 ) and maintaining consistency of design across platforms.…”

“…2. Prior work (e.g., [1,4]) noted that practitioners have difficulties getting useful feedback without deploying functional prototypes in the field due to the lack of research frameworks and analysis methods to explore a realistic cross-section of contextually appropriate usage scenarios. We extend this finding by unpacking the design complexity imposed by the many, often unanticipated ways devices can interact with one another in a multi-device experience.…”

Cross-Communicability: Evaluating the Meta-communication of Cross-Platform Applications

“…People are increasingly using applications and services that span a wide variety of computing devices, such as PCs, smartphones, tablets and digital TVs [1,2,3,4,5]. However, developing such systems can be a challenge because it is necessary to know not only how but also when to incorporate features available in one platform into the others, since each platform may differ in its capabilities and constraints (e.g., screen size and resolution, input mechanisms) [4,5,6,7].…”

“…Hence, it can be difficult and costly to maintain the quality of the system across each platform. Evaluating cross-platform systems is as challenging as designing them [1,4]. Traditional methods for assessing quality attributes of systems need to be adapted for the cross-platform context.…”