Why Interaction Design?

The first edition of About Face described a discipline called software design and equated it with another discipline called user interface design. Of these two terms, user interface design has certainly had better longevity. We still use it occasionally in this book, where it seems most appropriate.

However, it seems clear to the authors that what is discussed in this book is a discipline larger than the design of user interfaces. The word interface denotes a surface, and much of the design issues that this book addresses go far deeper than the surface of a CRT screen: They go right to the heart of what a digital product is and what it does.

In recent years, a number of terms have been proposed for this type of design. When corporate interest in the Web had reached its peak around 2000, a discipline called information architecture (IA) seemed like it might eventually embody the kind of design discussed here. But, even as the financial prospects of the Web have waned, IA has largely retained its narrow, Web-centric view of organizing and navigating content in pages. With the apparent decline of the new economy, the fortunes of the IA community have similarly diminished.

Another term that has recently gained some popularity is experience design. The American Institute of Graphic Artists (AIGA), in particular, has advocated the use of this term as an umbrella under which different design and usability disciplines collaborate to create digital products and systems. This idea has great appeal, but it still begs the question of what kind of design is really at the heart of interactive systems, a kind of design that is clearly new and different from what came before.

The idea of designing experience is also a bit problematic. Experience, in the authors' opinion, is the result of the interaction between humans and artifacts (or other living things). Experience occurs in an environmental context, and is further modulated by an internal, psychological, personal enviroment shaped by motivations, past experiences, temperament, and various congnitive factors.

We can't, as designers, truthfully claim to be able to design a user's experience of an artifact or system, but we can design the mechanisms for interacting with an artifact to enhance the user's experience of it. Because we believe that experience occurs in the interaction between the human and the artifact, we have chosen the term interaction design—first coined by Bill Moggridge and Bill Verplank in the 1980s—to denote the kind of design this book describes. You cannot design experience itself, but you can design interactive behaviors that modulate or direct experience.