Why Interaction Design?


Why Interaction Design?

The term design can be difficult to get a handle on. Consider this infamous sentence by design history scholar John Heskett: "Design is to design a design to produce a design."

People have many preconceived notions about design, not the least of which is that design concerns only how things look: design as decoration or styling. But communication (graphic) and industrial design also bring ways of working that interaction designers should embrace. Here are some of the attitudes that designers have:

  • Focusing on users. Designers know that users don't understand or care how the company that makes a product is run and structured. Users care about doing their tasks and achieving their goals within their limits. Designers are advocates for end-users.

  • Finding alternatives. Designing isn't about choosing among multiple optionsit's about creating options, finding a "third option" instead of choosing between two undesirable ones. This creation of multiple possible solutions to problems sets designers apart. Consider, for example, Google's AdWords. The company needed advertising for revenue, but users hated traditional banner ads. Thus, designers came up with a third approach: text ads.

  • Using ideation and prototyping. Designers find their solutions through brainstorming and then, most important, building models to test the solutions (Figure 1.3). Certainly, scientists and architects and even accountants model things, but design involves a significant difference: design prototypes aren't fixed. Any particular prototype doesn't necessarily represent the solution, only a solution. It's not uncommon to use several prototypes to create a single product. Jeff Hawkins, designer of the original Palm Pilot, famously carried around small blocks of wood until he came upon the right size, shape, and weight for the device.

  • Collaborating and addressing constraints. Few designers work alone. Designers usually need resources (money, materials, developers, printers, and so on) to produce what they dream up, and these resources come with their own constraints. Designers seldom have carte blanche to do whatever they want. They must address business goals, compromise with teammates, and meet deadlines. Designing is almost always a team effort.

  • Creating appropriate solutions. Most designers create solutions that are appropriate only to a particular project at a particular point in time. Designers certainly carry experience and wisdom from one project to the next, but the ultimate solution should uniquely address the issues of that particular problem. This is not to say that the solution (the product) cannot be used in other contextsexperience tells us it can and will bebut that the same exact solution cannot (or shouldn't anyway) be exactly copied for other projects. Amazon has a great e-commerce model, but it can't be exactly replicated elsewhere (although pieces of it certainly can be); it works well within the context of the Amazon site. Design solutions have to be appropriate to the situation.

  • Drawing on a wide range of influences. Because design touches on so many subject areas (psychology, ergonomics, economics, engineering, architecture, art, and more), designers bring to the table a broad, multidisciplinary spectrum of ideas from which to draw inspiration and solutions.

  • Incorporating emotion. In analytical thinking, emotion is seen as an impediment to logic and making the right choices. In design, products without an emotional component are lifeless and do not connect with people. Emotion needs to be thoughtfully included in design decisions. What would the Volkswagen Beetle be without whimsy?

Figure 1.3. Designers create prototypes to find a solution, not the solution.

courtesy of Cheryl Gach


Because interaction designers employ these approaches and the qualitative methods and the processes that other design disciplines use (see Chapters 2, 4, and 5), interaction design's strongest ties are to the discipline of designnot to, say, human-computer interaction or cognitive psychology, although it does draw heavily on those fields. Interaction designers are designers, for good and ill.




Designing for Interaction(c) Creating Smart Applications and Clever Devices
Designing for Interaction: Creating Smart Applications and Clever Devices
ISBN: 0321432061
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 110
Authors: Dan Saffer

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