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Designing interactivity in media interfaces: a communications perspective

Published: 10 April 2010 Publication History

Abstract

Interactivity has become ubiquitous in the digital media landscape. Numerous interactive tools are designed, tested, deployed and evaluated. Yet, we do not have generalizable knowledge about the larger concept of interactivity and its psychological impact on user experience. As a first step toward a theory of interface interactivity, this paper identifies three species of interactivity corresponding to three central elements of communication - source, medium, and message. Interactivity situated in any of these three loci of communication can provide cues and affordances that operate either individually or together to capture users' attention and determine the nature and depth of their processing of online content as well as contribute to their perceptions, attitudes and behavioral intentions. This paper discusses psychological mechanisms by which the three classes of interactivity tools affect users, with the specific purpose of drawing out design implications and outlining UI challenges for strategic development of interactive interfaces.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CHI '10: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
April 2010
2690 pages
ISBN:9781605589299
DOI:10.1145/1753326
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 10 April 2010

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Author Tags

  1. customization
  2. interactivity
  3. modality
  4. online sources
  5. perceptual bandwidth
  6. user enagement

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