100 Ideas for Envisioning Powerful, Engaging, and Productive User Experiences in Knowledge Work
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Idea Category B. Defining Interaction Objects  Within a product team’s emerging concepts for mediating knowledge work, there are both actions and implied or explicit recipients of those actions. In some cases, the recipient of an action may be an onscreen tool that workers can act either on or through. When product teams do not thoughtfully frame and flesh out these primary onscreen objects, resulting applications may present workers with inconsistent, unfamiliar, and confusing data structures that feel as if they must be learned “from the ground up.” Legible interaction objects can leverage workers’ existing expertise by directly referencing specific artifacts that are currently found in their work practices. By drawing meaningful connections to known constructs and material culture, applications can trigger useful expectations in workers that may help them to understand what can be done to and with corresponding onscreen items. There are a number of specific issues that may arise when work practice transitions from dealing with material artifacts to dealing with intangible interaction objects. Many of these issues can be the result of reducing or eliminating important cues that workers normally read from artifacts’ physical placements and visible forms. To actively address these potential problems, product teams can design key cues back into onscreen objects based on careful consideration of usage scenarios. This category contains 10 of the 100 application envisioning ideas in this book: B1. Named objects and information structures B2. Flexible identification of object instances B3. Coupling of application and real world objects B4. Object associations and user defined objects B5. Object states and activity flow visibility B6. Flagged variability within or between objects B7. Object ownership and availability rules B8. Explicit mapping of objects to work mediation B9. Common management actions for objects B10. Object templates Product teams can use these ideas to explore knowledge worker’s potential experiences of the interaction objects in their application concepts. Given the inherent abstraction of computing environments and the limited space of workers’ screens, early ideation on this topic can promote the development of conceptually clear, consistent, and actionable focal points within computing tools. The central notion of this category is most closely related to the “Exploring work mediation and determining scope” (A), “Establishing an application framework” (C), “Enhancing information representation” (F), and “Working with volumes of information” (I) categories. < PREVIOUS PAGE | NEXT PAGE > Back to top | View Table of Contents |
All original contents of Working through Screens online book are subject to the creative commons license (Attribution-NonCommercial- ShareAlike http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/) unless otherwise noted. Please attribute the work to “Jacob Burghardt / FLASHBULB INTERACTION Consultancy.” |