Structured approaches to interaction design : a way to bridge the gap between the results of foundational user research and the final design of a user interface

The present manuscript-based doctoral thesis addresses the question of how approaches to interaction design can be made more structured. This is an attempt to make it more transparent how one can come to a final design of a user interface starting from the results of foundational user research. The results of this analysis can help designers to work very systematic at times, to better reflect on their own idiosyncratic design process “on the job”, or to learn interaction design in the first place. In user-centered design (UCD) there are lifecycles and methods that already provide a certain degree of structuring with the discrimination of different phases etc. But they leave open some gaps here and there. This work is an attempt to close some of the gaps and bring closer together these individual methods.
Interaction design patterns are a way to describe solutions to problems in designing user in-terfaces in a very systematic way. However, pattern libraries usually are far from complete. They mostly lack patterns to support the early phases of interaction design and therefore they do usually not link to the abstract models of conceptual design. The third manuscript describes an organizational scheme for interaction design patterns to support the process of implementing a complete pattern language covering all the different levels of the solution domain. The scheme has been found by analyzing several established UCD lifecycles and it has been evaluated by organizing all the individual patterns of several public pattern libraries into it. The first manuscript describes a process of systematically building up a pattern language alongside of a redesign project of a complex application in a corporate environment. The second manuscript describes how patterns have been evaluated in the aforementioned project, when there were several different solutions for one problem. This is shown with two interaction design patterns for the problem of making required input fields visible to users.
The fourth manuscript is an attempt to bring together the idea of a complete pattern language, as a description of the solution domain of interaction design, with the different parts of the problem domain. Therefore, the same UCD lifecycles (as in the third manuscript) have been analyzed to find a universal structure of the problem domain. Then all the mappings between the individual parts of the two domains have been described in order to link the two domains in this direct way. Another way of looking at the gap between the problem domain and the solution domain is by seeing it as a distance of levels of abstraction between results of foundational user research and the final user interface. From this point of view a bridging of the gap can be seen in different intermediate representations (abstract models, sketches, and prototypes) and linking them together in a coherent way.
These different ways of bridging the gap between foundational user research and the final design of a user interface can be seen as cognitive artifacts to foster problem solving and learning of interaction designers.