Interaction Design Tools

You can download sheets for user research and concept generation in interaction and service design below.

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 activity pages in your data collection. The user page is loosely based on the dimensions of personas described by Cooper, Reimann and Cronin (2007), 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, 1969, in Wertsch, 1998). I have also added a few questions that aims at finding opportunities for design.

The Concept Design Sheet is a response to my students who always ask what we mean by a design concept. 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, but I have also added one question for defining the qualities of the use-experience. Here it aids to think through all the aspects of the interaction design quality prism: Practical, Communicational, Aesthetic, Organizational, Technological and Ethical (Arvola, 2010). I have also added specific questions that focus on ethics, and how people and the world are affected by the design, in the short run as well as in the long run.

• Persona Sheet (English)
• Personaformulär (Swedish)

• Concept Design Sheet (English)
• Formulär för konceptdesign (Swedish)

Disclaimer

These charts are like training wheels. Eventually they will become second nature to you and at that point you will not need them anymore. They are good for making you focus on the right things, but you should not use them as presentation material. Make use of your imagination and find ways of presenting your personas and concept that highlight the important things in them.

References

Arvola, M. (2010). Interaction Design Qualities: Theory and Practice. In Proceedings of the 6th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (NordiCHI 2010), pp. 595-598. Reykjavik, Iceland, October 16 - 20, 2010. New York, NY: ACM Press. [ PDF ]

Burke, K. (1969). A Grammar of Motives. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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

Wertsch, J. V. (1998). Mind as Action. Oxford: Oxford University Press.