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. © 2011 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.