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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.

Defining Interaction Design

Simply put, interaction design is the definition and design of the behavior of artifacts, environments, and systems , as well as the formal elements that communicate that behavior. Unlike traditional design disciplines, whose focus has historically been on form and, more recently, on content and meaning, interaction design seeks first to plan and describe how things behave and then, as necessary, to describe the most effective form to communicate those behaviors (see Figure 1).

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Figure 1: Three dimensions of design. Design has traditionally focused on form and, more recently, on meaning and content. The newest dimension of design is behavior , how complex systems interact with humans .

Interaction design borrows theory and technique from traditional design, usability, and engineering disciplines. It is a synthesis, however—more than a sum of its parts —with its own unique methods and practices. It is also very much a design discipline, with a different approach than that of scientific and engineering disciplines.

In particular, interaction design is a discipline concerned with:

Defining the form of products as they relate to their behaviors and uses
Anticipating how the use of products will affect human relationships and understanding
Exploring the dialogue between products, people, and contexts (physical, cultural, historical) (Reimann and Forlizzi, 2001)

Interaction design approaches the design of products with a Goal-Directed perspective:

From an understanding of how and why people desire to use them
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As an advocate for the users and their goals
As gestalts, not simply as sets of features and attributes
By looking to the future—seeing things as they might be, not necessarily as they currently are

Because the behaviors of complex systems are often not a matter of aesthetics, but rather one of cognitive factors and logical processes, interaction design is both amenable to and greatly aided by a systematic approach.

Interaction designers need, first and foremost, to understand the goals, motivations, and expectations (the mental models) of the people for whom they hope to design. These can best be understood as narratives—logical (or emotional) progressions over time.

In response to these narratives, designed artifacts must exhibit behavioral narratives of their own that mesh successfully with those of the user . Unlike most mechanical artifacts, which have only a few simple behaviors that become obvious upon inspection, software and other digital artifacts require interaction design because of the potential complexity of their behaviors. Software is opaque to inspection, yet its possible behaviors are almost limitless.

Some designers, entrenched in the design traditions of form (visual, audible, and tactile themes, patterns, styles, and idioms), argue that interactive elements should be treated as streams of sense data that change over time, similar to motion pictures, and may thus be fully described by traditional design methods. This argument, however, is seriously flawed: Although the form-oriented aspects of interaction design are obviously important, they are almost useless unless they are organized by effective and appropriate behaviors. Without a logical structure and a flow that facilitate solving the practical problems of users, form-oriented interactive design is, by itself, sensual titillation of questionable value.

To put it differently, sense data means nothing without the narrative that lets us make logical sense of it. Special effects alone do not make a movie; the narrative is also essential. This is even more valid for interactions with digital products because the dialogue is not between fictional creations observed by a third party. It is, instead, a first-person exchange of what Bill Buxton (1990) has called " non-verbal natural language" between the human and the designed artifact. The anticipation and design of this dialogue—this behavior—is the essence of interaction design.

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Cooper A., Reimann R.

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