9
Cross-device interactions
and interusability
Claire Rowland
Introduction
In systems where functionality and interactions are distributed across more
than one device, it’s not enough to design individual UIs in isolation.
Designers need to create a coherent UX across all the devices with which the
user interacts. That means thinking about how UIs work together to create a
coherent understanding of the overall system, and how the user may move
between using different devices.
This chapter explores interusability - the user experience of interconnected
devices and cross-platform interactions – and how to make a bunch of diverse
devices feel like they are working in concert.
This chapter introduces:
Sentence about cross-platform UX and usability (see page 2)
What is interusability? (see page 4)
The role of conceptual models in understanding what a system does, and
why these are especially complex in IoT (see page 5)
Composition: distributing functionality between devices (see page 14)
Consistency across multiple UIs (see page 24)
Continuity of data and interactions across devices (see page 30)
Applying interusability thinking to broader contexts (see page 42)