Planning and Designing Behavior

The planning of complex digital products, especially ones that interact directly with humans, requires a significant up-front effort by professional designers, just as the planning of complex physical structures that interact with humans require a significant up-front effort by professional architects. In the case of architects, that planning involves understanding how the humans occupying the structure live and work, and designing spaces to support and facilitate those behaviors. In the case of digital products, the planning involves understanding how the humans using the product live and work, and designing product behavior and form that supports and facilitates the human behaviors. Architecture is an old, well-established field. The design of product and system behavior—interaction design—is quite new, and only in recent years has it begun to come of age as a discipline.

Interaction design isn't a matter of aesthetic choice, but rather it is based on an understanding of users and cognitive principles. This is good news because it makes the design of behavior quite amenable to a repeatable process of analysis and synthesis. It doesn't mean that the design of behavior can be automated, any more than the design of form or content can be automated, but it does mean that a systematic approach is possible. Rules of form and aesthetics mustn't be discarded, of course, but they must work in harmony with the larger concern of achieving user goals via appropriately designed behaviors.

This book presents a set of methods to address the needs of this new kind of behavior-oriented design that addresses the goals (Rudolf, 1998) of users: Goal-Directed Design. To understand Goal-Directed Design, we first need to better understand human goals and how they provide the key to designing appropriate interactive behavior.