Interaction Design is the creation of a dialogue between a person and a product, service or system. This dialogue is usually found in the world of behavior—the way someone may hold his knife and fork while cutting into a steak, or the way one chooses to purchase a beautiful chair, trading off cost for beauty or brand for convenience. Structuring dialogue is difficult, as it occurs in a fourth dimension—over time. To design behavior requires an understanding of the fluidity of natural dialogue, which is both reactionary and anticipatory at the same time. Common metrics for evaluating Interaction Design track the “ease of use” one has with negotiating an interface, yet usability is only a portion of a larger set of characteristics that become relevant during this dialogue. Objects, services and systems that have staying power frequently have qualities other than ease of use that cause them to become timeless, or priceless, or desirable.
These “other qualities” are subjective, and design has often been considered an applied art. Yet there is a subtle distinction between artist and designer. An artist makes a statement, a distinct argument, through his canvas or clay or metal, and the viewer responds. A conversation evolves, through acceptance, or rejection, or understanding, or bewilderment. The artist rarely claims a responsibility to the audience—many artists create because they like to, or because they feel that they “have to”—and clarity of message may be less relevant than a strong emotional reaction. “I do not understand your message, yet I understand that I do not like it”. The audience is able to form opinions and actions without becoming intimate with the content.
The designer has a harder task. Design work is of function, and language, and meaning. Through visual and semantic language, a designer must create a design that assists the viewer not only in experiencing a particular emotion but also in truly understanding the content. This understanding goes deeper than just usability and is not isolated in a single instance in time. The audience must actually realize the intentions of the designer, and embrace the culture of the language that is presented. This language is not metaphorical. The designer does not design as language is spoken. In fact, design is language: the linguistic quality of form and content is indicated through context and use. The poet selects a topic and paints a vivid understanding of scene through character, time, and the beauty of the language. In a similar fashion, the product designer envisions an object and forms a vivid understanding of context through shape, weight, color, and material.
Interaction Designers, however, speak both words and form at once. They structure a compelling argument and invite the audience to share in their work. The work evolves over time, and the work is completed by the presence and synthesis of the audience. User centered design, as frequently practiced, does not truly give credence to the importance of the “user.” The creation lays dormant until the “user” honestly understands the beauty of what has been designed. If the user never understands this, then the creation is never actually “usable.” This is not a noble and altruistic profession through intention, but rather through need.
Understanding the role of technology
Much praise has been written about the design of consumer electronics. Apple has been heralded by both business magazines and consumer reviews as the leader in innovation and authority on design; each new Motorola phone or Playstation release is announced as a huge leap forward in innovation. Yet these products—the best of the best—only hint at the capabilities of technology, if applied in a humanistic and aesthetically relevant manner. For at the end of the day, the music player is still a brick (albeit a much lighter brick than was previously available), and cell phones are still hard to use, and video games—while realistic—still follow the simple “kill it if it moves” gaming storylines of the early 1990s. These designs are not timeless, and they are not elegant. It is almost comical to wonder if these designs will be with us in five years, or in ten. Will people invite them into their houses for the rest of their lives, as they would a spouse? A more likely answer is that, in ten years, most consumers will have ditched their iPod for something younger and will have divorced the RAZR for something more beautiful.
Technology now affords a dramatic set of positive outcomes for humanity—massive social change, positively brilliant entertainment, and a more compelling understanding of self. The appropriate manifestation and use of technological advancements can bring about powerful change with regards to the mind, body and soul. These benefits are made possible by advances in engineering, yet they will not be found by engineering advances alone. Nor will the benefits be realized by the business savvy executives, as the problems are human problems first and business problems second. Instead, the changes will be realized by designers, and by a specific breed of designers: those creative designers who are both artists and engineers, and who are able to balance, over an extended period of time, technology and aesthetics without ever losing sight of the most important facet of design: humanity.
Interaction Design as a professional discipline
Interaction Design is recognized as a new field, but people have been designing interactions for centuries. The field has deeply embedded roots in various existing disciplines. As such, the subject frequently gets confused with some of these other fields, many of which share common names, acronyms or techniques.
Interaction Design isn’t necessarily the creation of websites. It isn’t necessarily multimedia design, or graphical-user interface (GUI) design, and it doesn’t even have to have a primary focus on advanced technology, although technology of some kind usually plays a significant role. A more appropriate, albeit academic definition of the field better reflects the working practitioner as well as predicts the future of this exciting profession: Interaction Design is the creation of a dialogue between a person and a product, system or service. This dialogue is both physical and emotional in nature, and is manifested in form, function and technology.
The field of Interaction Design has been acknowledged as a structured and unique discipline only in the last twenty years, generally in keeping with the pervasiveness and nature of technological change. As communication and computing technology has increased in speed, function and capability, and decreased in size and cost, more and more consumer products can be found to contain some form of digitization. While this digital component frequently increases the overall utility of the product, it also serves to increase the complexity of the user experience. Thus, Interaction Designers find themselves performing usability evaluations on what were traditionally simple products, often in an attempt to ease the suffering of their end user. While Interaction Designers often work for the most financially motivated corporations, they frequently become the single champion for the consumer and spend a majority of their time trying to understand and model the “user’s goals” as related to the business or technical goals.
Interaction Design borrows heavily from the field of psychology with regard to cognition, memory and perception. It also draws equally from the world of art and design as it encompasses aesthetics and emotion. Successful Interaction Design affects a user on an emotional and highly personal level; a painting can be challenging, and so can an interactive product.
Interaction Design frequently gets confused with the design of websites, because people interact with websites and because web development teams find value in having Interaction Designers working with them. Interaction Design also gets mislabeled by business owners as multimedia or interactive design. While designers of interactive media certainly should be skilled in the techniques and methods described in this text, interactive media is almost always technologically centered rather than human centered. The majority of professional multimedia development is constrained to a specific software package and the capabilities associated with that, rather than centered around the constraints of an end user. For example, a recent job posting for a “Manager, Interactive Creative” position requires “Adobe Photoshop, Adobe ImageReady, Adobe Illustrator, Flash, HTML, DHTML. Ability to learn and adapt to new technologies and software. Familiar with Macromedia Dreamweaver, Flash and other similar programs. Understand and stay current with the capabilities of internet-related technologies like: style-sheets, dynamic HTML, server-side programming, Javascript and Java.” These are technologies, and while the person who ends up filling this position most likely understands the value of human-centered design, the job description implies a company culture that is strongly computing-centered. This tool-centeredness seems to indicate that a Design problem can be “fixed” by simply providing the right set of skills. In fact, the process of Design requires a rigorous methodology combined with this diverse set of skills and a tremendous amount of passion.
Designing and shaping behavior
Interaction Design is complicated. It is closely related to a number of important disciplines, and it encompasses many of these other fields. But the approach in the following pages attempts to reposition the field of Interaction Design away from a solely technical field or an artistic endeavor, and instead towards a duality that emphasizes the human side of technology. The Interaction Designer must become an expert in how human beings relate to each other, and to the world, and to the changing nature of technology and business. This understanding of behavior is important now in a usability sense, as technology has afforded the creation of massively complicated systems and services which people have a hard time comprehending. The understanding of behavior becomes more important—and hopefully a great deal more fun—when the potential of Interaction Design is realized: When Interaction Designers stop being advocates for simply usable designs and begin to herald the creation of more poetic design solutions.
Creations that transcend “usability” are those that resonate deeply and profoundly, and are those that make people feel passionately. We can consider a product as having attributes that are distinguishing characteristics, and these characteristics make us feel a certain way. The object becomes a vehicle for the designer to speak with a viewer, much like a painter uses a canvas to communicate with an audience.
One of the main distinctions between art and design, however, may be the bidirectional nature of the communication. Interaction Design is a dialogue. The designer speaks, and the user speaks back. Over time, the communication becomes involved. This may occur as a product becomes older and worn, or as a user becomes older and worn. Users change their innate responses to the object based on past experiences, perhaps through rote memorization or perhaps through a more associative integration of product into lifestyle. The ultimate goal of design, then, is to have a subtle, lasting and intuitive dialogue with a person, the same sort of dialogue a married couple may share after years together—the type of dialogue that occurs at a glance and often without a great deal of rational introspection. Implicit dialogue means an internal monologue that is communicated through action. As we learn to “intuitively” use a product, we are in fact illustrating the scope of our past experiences with it. This is in direct opposition with “experience design”. While we can mold activity through brute force or trial and error, designers cannot create experiences with any degree of continuity. Instead, Interaction Designers exist to support experiences through the continual dialogue between people and products.