Benefits of Change

In the software world, the apologists are so numerous and influential that their rule is waning only slowly. But wane it will. What it takes is a widespread understanding that technology doesn't have to be so dehumanizing. As more and more users of software-based products have interactive experiences that are not humiliating, they will come to lose patience with those that continue to harass and embarrass them. They will boot the dancing bears out of town.

When the users of software-based products were few, they were also the insiders, who knew how difficult software's feats were. As the technology explodes into the mainstream, those who partake of its power are less aware of the greatness of the accomplishment. They are not willing to forgive a product with bad interaction just because building it was difficult.

Following technology seems like a good plan, but it usually brings only boring products that are more-complex derivatives of products that came before them. Interaction design lets you break out of that pattern and create products that do things that have never been done before.

Interaction design makes your product desirable, conferring on it the singular advantage of customer loyalty. After you make a customer happy with your product, he will stick with your company and your brand for a long time. If your product is merely dancing bearware, your customers will be quietly casting their eyes around, looking for easier, friendlier alternatives.

Interaction design can shorten the amount of time that you spend developing your product. Knowing what to do in advance means that you will spend less time blundering about trying to discover by accident the right thing to do.

Getting to the right product is always a matter of iterating. It always takes several tries to get the details right. With interaction design done in advance, the number of iterations it takes can be reduced significantly. There is enormous cost in each new version of a product, so if you can reduce the version count from, say, four to two, there is a lot of time and money to be saved.

Having to make fewer versions and having to throw away less code will make the development process cheaper. Programmers often complain that our designs involve more-complex code, and sometimes this is true. However, there is typically a lot less of it in total. The cost of code doesn't increase much as its difficulty increases, but it becomes a lot more expensive as the quantity of it increases. Each extra line of code must be tested, debugged, and supported.