Interpreting "Five Elements of Interactive Behavior" for You

Have you ever encountered such a problem:

Getting the needs of leaders or product managers seems obvious, but there is no way to start; When you make a plan and give it to the team for review, it makes no sense to explain it when faced with questions or inquiries from others; Want to learn interactive design, read a lot of books or confused.

Then, the "five elements of interactive behavior" that this article is going to talk about may help you clear the clouds.

Speaking of "five elements", you may be most familiar with the five elements of user experience. It was put forward by Garrett, the founder of adaptive path, and was actively quoted after it was published on the Internet in March 2000.

But this is not what we are going to discuss today.

They overlap in theory, but they are not the same in application. The five elements of interactive design can guide us to carry out practical design activities more systematically, so as to achieve a good user experience.

"Five elements of interactive behavior" was put forward by Xin Xiangyang in his paper "Interaction Design: From Physical Logic to Behavioral Logic" in 2005. These five elements are mainly "users, scenes, behaviors, tools or media, and purposes", but these five words are translation. If you want to better understand the meaning of these words, I suggest you think in the English context, that is:

Before I explain in detail, I want to give you a conceptual premise. As the title of the paper says, these five elements are based on "behavior logic", which is different from the physical logic of "design object" in traditional product design. Traditional product design is based on physical attributes: such as size, shape, structure, color, material and other functions or physical composition; Interaction design emphasizes: who, under what circumstances, and through what ways and means to accomplish what.

For example, you want to design a teacup.

The product design of physical logic is to consider its function first: cup body, cup cover, cup handle, filter screen and possibly coaster, so you may design the following cups.

However, if it is an interactive design of behavioral logic, we will consider: a person who loves tea walks in the pedestrian street with his girlfriend on weekends to buy clothes, walks into a drink shop when he is thirsty, wants to drink a cup of English black tea (purpose), pays for the tea, continues to drink tea with his girlfriend while going to a clothing store, and goes home with a big bag after drinking (action). At that time, it was obviously impossible to use the cup above, because it was inconvenient to carry and throw it away at home. )┏

So based on behavioral logic, the designed cup is sauce purple ~ ~

Why do you want to design for people, that is, the user role we often say. It can be subdivided into "primary user role, secondary user role and temporary user role". Each role has its own customary characteristics (such as cultural background, hobbies, personality and other long-term individual characteristics) and cognitive characteristics related to products (such as the use of certain products, impression evaluation, frequency of use, etc.). ).

These all affect the possible behavior motivation and decision-making of users. For example, a lazy girl who is looking forward to the tea-drinking process feels that she doesn't need to emphasize efficiency on weekends and likes to be casual. She may persuade her good friends to sit in a drink shop and drink tea before leaving. At this time, if the designer wants to provide it to her, I'm afraid she can't make a take-away paper cup.

In translation, this word has the meaning of "environment, context, context". From this, it refers to the external environment in which the user has a relationship with the product, and the internal and external related situations that may occur during the user's behavior.

Interaction design should serve typical scenarios, and this element fully embodies this point.

First of all, the scene environment is closely related to users, which is related to users that we should pay attention to in our design; In addition, the environment is complex, so the typical scenes where the main characters are located should be given priority. Therefore, analyzing and planning primary and secondary scenarios is the premise of design, and it is also an important basis for decision-making when encountering design contradictions.

For example, the beverage store mentioned above, if its store is located in a commercial pedestrian street instead of an office or residential area, the number of mobile users in the commercial street is large, and people are concerned about a wide variety of goods, so they don't have enough patience to stop and finish a cup of tea or coffee, but the beverage store just wants to save costs, so it can sell takeout directly with paper cups instead of the drinking space in the store. Because this is his main scene and user base, balancing cost and income, those scenes that a few people want to sit in the store can be ignored.

This is the channel that users need to achieve a certain goal. Traditionally, tools expressed by means are often regarded as products, but they are not. It is the carrier for you to use a product. If you want to buy coffee, you have to buy it through a drink shop; To order take-out, you should use your mobile phone or computer to open the take-out software; Long-distance travel means arriving at the destination by plane or train. "Beverage shop, mobile phone or computer, plane or train" is the means and method to achieve the goal, not the product service itself. The products and services we want to design here are a series of processes of finding a drink shop, deciding to buy, buying and drinking; It is the experience of checking the itinerary, buying tickets, taking a bus and arriving at the destination; This is a way of behavior.

Means provide us with an opportunity, condition or constraint to plan our behavior in some way.

Purpose is a factor directly related to motivation. People often have certain demands before they want to achieve certain results. If you don't care about this result, then the behavior itself, or the product service itself, is out of the question.

The purpose of analysis can be summarized as "fuzzy purpose, clear purpose and random purpose".

Fuzzy purpose is a general direction, users know what to get, but they can't describe it clearly. For example, you want to be an artist when you grow up, but what kind of art? Art, music, literature? They have something in common, but there are also differences. You may learn a general introduction to art, and regard popular information as a vague behavior.

A clear purpose is that users not only know what they want, but also can describe it clearly. For example, if you want to be an artist, you will take learning painting, photography and three points as a specific behavior in the process of growing up.

The purpose of randomness is what you want, but you don't know what you want, let alone describe it clearly. For example, you want to live a full life. In the process of growing up, you may regard learning everything with curiosity as a random behavior.

Reflected in the software application design, such as you use a video app. The purpose of fuzziness is: if you really want to watch a movie, but don't know what to watch, just open the latest hot screening, click on one, and look at the comments and details. If you feel uninterested, change to another movie and do a repetitive behavior; The clear purpose is: you just want to watch "Venom", search for "Venom", click to watch, give an evaluation after reading, and do linear single behavior; The purpose of randomness is that if you are waiting for the bus, or taking the bus or subway, you are a little bored and want to have a look at anything casually, so as to pass the boring time. Open the software to browse at will, read comments, collect them, or click on one directly, which will lead to fragmented and uncertain behavior.

As mentioned above, purpose and action are mutually causal. Action is the most direct embodiment of design quality. What behavior users may have and what kind of behavior guidance designers provide through interfaces and processes will directly let users evaluate the quality of the experience.

To achieve a goal, there must be one or more predictable behaviors. On the one hand, these behaviors can guide designers how to design interactive processes, on the other hand, they can also inspire designers from which angles to use behaviors to innovate.

The design based on users' inherent habits can make users naturally happy, thus conforming to users' habits and achieving a comfortable experience. For example, some news, video and information apps make the content list into a waterfall according to the purpose of "browsing the content randomly", so that users can browse smoothly all the time with only one sliding action, which is natural and in line with expectations; Of course, you can also design beyond expectations, without relying on users' behavior, but guide users to do other work further, such as e-commerce website. When you have placed an order to complete the purpose, it will also display other goods related to your order according to your historical data and preferences, so that you can't help clicking again and induce further consumption.

To sum up, do you understand the relationship between the five elements of interactive behavior and the essence of interactive design?

Today, many practitioners of interaction design practice are still unable to describe the concept of interaction in very accurate language. Inspired by Kenneth Burke's five-in-one and "identity" theory, these five elements organically integrate the concept of interactive design, and encourage designers or analysts to design and innovate from five dimensions: "re-determining participants, positioning behavioral motives, planning behavioral processes, seeking new means, and creating new scenes and environments".

In the following article, based on these five elements, I will further explain to you how to do a good job in demand analysis and design scheme, so that you can become an excellent interactive designer who integrates analysis, design and output.

Reasonable and effective interactive design scheme is produced under the comprehensive influence of these five elements, which determine what kind of interface and process designers should provide for users.

But in practical work, the people, means, context and purpose of these five elements are relatively fixed, and there is almost no room for creativity. Interaction designers usually focus on action. Of course, this action plan should also be formed on the basis of fully analyzing the first four elements.

The five elements of interactive behavior are favorable tools for interactive design. Try to use them to think about the interface and process, and use them to report or discuss your plan, which will benefit a lot ~ ~