Interaction design
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Interaction Design is the creation of a representational dialogue among people and intelligent products, environments and communications encountered in their everyday experience.
As products become more complicated, often due to technology, designers are facing new challenges in gaining strong user acceptance. The number of people using and developing products powered by some sort of technology continues to grow; these new systems are more functional and robust than ever, providing more features, functionality, and capabilities.
However, with the added complexity, the new generation of products is becoming more difficult to understand and use. As a result, users become more frustrated, unhappy and less productive. Large portions of functionality in the complicated software products and consumer electronics go unused, and products often fail in the consumer world due to their unnecessarily complicated user interfaces.
Interaction Design exists as the design of behavior, bounded by three core interests: Human, Technical and Aesthetic.
(Working definition below taken from Interaction Designers mailing list.)[1]
Interaction design (IxD) is the branch of user experience design that illuminates the relationship between people and the machines they use. While interaction design has a firm foundation in the theory, practice, and methodology of traditional user interface design, its focus is on defining the complex dialogues that occur between people and interactive devices of many types-from computers to mobile communication devices to appliances. Best practices in interaction design can be described with an Interaction design pattern
Historically the term interaction design has its roots in GUI-design. Interaction design has become more and more concerned about other interactions than the ones happening between a single user and a digital device. As professor Irene McAra-McWilliam notes: "interaction design used to be primarily about the aesthetics of the interactive experience - how it makes the user feel - whereas now it is increasingly concerned with the social and political implications of new technologies". One can ask if interaction design is tied only to situations where digital devices are involved. Could, for example, the design of party games and social events be seen as interaction design?
Interaction designers strive to create useful and usable products and services. Following the fundamental tenets of user-centered design, the practice of interaction design is grounded in an understanding of real users-their goals, tasks, experiences, needs, and wants. Approaching design from a user-centered perspective, while endeavoring to balance users' needs with business goals and technological capabilities, interaction designers provide solutions to complex design challenges, and define new and evolving interactive products and services.
The success of products in the marketplace depends on the design of high-quality, engaging interactive experiences. Good interaction design
- effectively communicates a system's interactivity and functionality
- defines behaviors that communicate a system's responses to user interactions
- reveals both simple and complex workflows
- informs users about system state changes
- prevents user error by using techniques such as behavior-shaping constraints
While interaction designers often work closely with specialists in visual design, information architecture, industrial design, user research, or usability, and may even provide some of these services themselves, their primary focus is on defining interactions.
The discipline of interaction design produces products and services that satisfy specific user needs, business goals, and technical constraints. Interaction designers advance their discipline by exploring innovative design paradigms and technological opportunities. As the capabilities of interactive devices evolve and their complexity increases, practitioners of the discipline of interaction design will play an increasingly important role in ensuring that technology serves people's needs. The recent proliferation of technologies used in communication and interaction, often using the internet for connectivity, has inspired interest in social interaction design. Designers increasingly recognize that user interactions often include other users as well as a mediating technology, and that interactions can include interpersonal and social factors as well as the conventional ones described here.
In summary, interaction design defines
- the structure and behaviors of interactive products and services
- user interactions with those products and services
General Steps in IxD
- User studies and creation of Personas and Scenarios
- Protopyping and Testing
- Implementation
A key issue in IxD is the iteration process where the aim is to build quick prototypes and test them with the users to make sure you are in the right path. The sooner you know you are right the better. Fixing mistakes at a later stage are very costly. The book "Interaction Design: beyond Human-Computer Interaction" is an easy start in this area.
External links
- Bruce Tognazzini's First Principles of Interaction Design
- Design Patterns in Interaction Design
- Interaction-Design.org - an open-content, peer-reviewed Encyclopedia covering terms from the disciplines of Interaction Design, HCI, Design, Human factors, Usability, Information architecture, and related fields.
- Interaction Design Patterns in Games
- Introducing Interaction Design - Boxes and Arrows
- News and tendancies
- Organizations
- American Institute of Graphic Arts
- Interaction Design Association
- Design Council on Interaction Design
- NextD Leadership Institute
- User Experience Network
- Education
- Artez Arhem degree programme Information & Interactive Media Design, Netherlands