Thoughts On Interaction Design
Introduction
I wrote this in 2011; keep that in mind when reading.
This text contemplates and contributes to the theory of Interaction Design. There exist a number of texts that have already explored Interaction Design. Some of these consider the role of design in Human-Computer Interaction, a field bounded by Cognitive Psychology and Computer Science. These texts usually describe the nature of design as related to a user interface design on a screen—emphasizing the specific elements that show up in an interface or examining examples of best practices, heuristics, or guidelines for creating interfaces. This type of text is frequently found in schools of computer science and may actually be used as a textbook for engineering students interested in understanding the human-level repercussions of their actions.
Other texts explore the nature of design as related to the creation of two-, three-, or four- dimensional forms. These texts look at aesthetic and emotional value provided by various shapes, compositions, or arrangements of elements. The mechanism for explaining formal choices is usually by example—showing a physical product or demonstrating a particular interactive piece—illustrating the result of design work in a graphical way that emphasizes beauty and elegance. This type of text is often found in schools of design or fine arts and may be used to illustrate a historical precedence for a particular stylistic movement.
There are, however, few texts that explore the semantic connections that live between technology and form that are brought to life when someone uses a product. These connections may be thought of as interactions—interactions that, in aggregate, make up behavior—and are beginning to hint that a field known as design is a legitimately separate area of study alongside science or art. This text describes Interaction Design and considers and reflects on the more theoretical and conceptual aspects of the discipline.
I'm fully aware that practicing Interaction Designers may find the contents of this text to be high level, academic, or seemingly void of pragmatic or immediately applicable use. This book will not provide immediate things one can do in the context of his or her job, and the book does not describe methods to use, ways to financially rationalize your work, or ways to code interactive simulations. Other books do this quite well.
Instead, it is my primary goal to better explain what Interaction Design is and why it is important: to provide a definition that encompasses the intellectual facets of the field, the conceptual underpinnings of Interaction Design as a legitimate human-centered discipline, and the particular methods used by practitioners in their day-to-day experiences.
A second goal is to provide Interaction Designers with the vocabulary necessary to intellectualize their work and communicate it to others: to other disciplines, to the popular media, to politicians, and ultimately, to decision makers. Without this justification, our advocations for the humane manifestation of technology may fall on deaf ears in the face of technological advancement.
A final goal is to highlight the potential for Interaction Design to exist outside of the confines of business and to assure fellow Interaction Designers that our work is instrumental in shaping and refining culture—and is as instrumental as other intellectually robust fields, like medicine, policy, or law. We need to possess a great intellectual capacity for complicated problem solving, for dynamic inquiry relating to technology, and for substantial empathy of the human experience. This intellectual insight is ideal for solving the difficult societal problems plaguing humanity and for humanizing technology, and the creation of pretty interfaces is perhaps the most blatant (and unfortunately prevalent) misuse of this critical resource.
Designers of all breeds bemoan their lack of representation in industry—we claim to be misunderstood, underpaid, and relegated to stylist or pixel pusher. If we are, in fact, stylists, then we deserve to be paid to style: to create a temporary visual feeling that is transient and cheap. But Interaction Design is not about a fleeting aesthetic. A cool Flash interface defines Interaction Design in the same way that accounting defines strategic business development—not at all. Interaction Designers are trained to observe humanity and to balance complicated ideas and are used to thinking in opposites: large and small, conceptual and pragmatic, human and technical. We are the shapers of behavior. Behavior is a large idea and may, at first blush, seem too large to warrant a single profession. But a profession has emerged nonetheless. As applied in business, the professional category includes the complexity of information architecture, the anthropological desire to understand humanity, the altruistic nature of usability engineering, and the creation of dialogue.
While there is now a need for this profession in business—perhaps to truly drive business—the value of Interaction Design is not in the creation of profits; these are incidental. The value is, instead, in the development of human-centered designs that better daily life for people and in the creation of a societal framework in which to experience these designs.
Overview
Interaction Design is the creation of a dialogue between a person and a product, service, or system. This dialogue is usually nearly invisible and found in the minutiae of daily life—the way someone may hold his knife and fork while cutting into a steak or the way another person may automatically switch windows to check her Facebook wall every few minutes or so. Structuring this form of ethereal dialogue is difficult, as it occurs in a fourth dimension—over time. To design for behavior requires an understanding of the fluidity of natural dialogue, which is both reactionary and anticipatory at the same time. Common metrics for evaluating Interaction Design track the ease of use one has with negotiating an interface, yet usability is only a portion of a larger set of characteristics that become relevant during this dialogue. Objects, services, and systems that are commercially successful frequently have qualities other than ease of use that cause them to become timeless, or priceless, or desirable.
These other qualities are subjective, and design has often been described as an applied art. Yet there is a subtle distinction between artist and designer. An artist makes a statement, a distinct argument, through his canvas or clay or metal, and the viewer responds. A conversation evolves, through acceptance, or rejection, or understanding, or bewilderment. The artist rarely claims a responsibility to the audience—many artists create because they like to or because they feel that they have to—and clarity of message may be less relevant than a strong emotional reaction. “I do not understand your message, yet I understand that I do not like it.” The audience is able to form opinions and actions without becoming intimate with the content.
A designer has a harder task. Design work is of function, and language, and meaning. Through visual and semantic language, a designer must create a design that assists the viewer not only in experiencing a particular emotion but also in truly understanding the content. This understanding is deeply culture specific and is not isolated in a single instance in time. The audience must actually realize the intentions of the designer and embrace the culture of the language that is presented. The designer does not design as language is spoken. Instead, design is a form of language: the linguistic quality of form and content is indicated through context and use. The poet selects a topic and paints a vivid understanding of scene through character, time, and the beauty of the language. In a similar fashion, the product designer envisions an object and forms a vivid understanding of context through shape, weight, color, and material.
Interaction Designers, however, speak both words and form at once. They structure a compelling argument and invite the audience to share in the creation of a dialogue. The work evolves over time, and the work is completed by the presence and synthesis of the audience. User-centered design, as frequently practiced, often does not truly give credence to the importance of the user. The creation lies dormant until the user completely understands the intellectual depth and completely feels the emotional qualities of what has been designed. If the user never understands or feels, then the creation is never actually usable. This is not a noble and altruistic profession through intention, but rather through need.
Understanding the role of technology
Much praise has been written about the design of consumer electronics. Apple has been heralded by both business magazines and consumer reviews as the leader in innovation and authority on design; each new Nokia phone or Playstation release is announced as a huge leap forward in innovation. Yet these products—seemingly the best of the best—only hint at the capabilities of technology, if applied in a humanistic and aesthetically relevant manner. For at the end of the day, the music player is still a brick (albeit a much lighter brick than was previously available), and cell phones are still hard to use, and video games—while realistic—still follow the simple kill-it-if-it-moves gaming storylines of the early 1990s. These designs are not timeless, and they are not elegant. It is not a surprise that consumer electronics quickly end up in landfills, as there is no reason to keep them for any extended period of time.
Technology now affords a dramatic set of positive outcomes for humanity—massive social change, positively brilliant entertainment, and a more compelling understanding of self. The appropriate manifestation and use of technological advancements can bring about powerful change with regard to the mind, body, and soul. These benefits are made possible by advances in engineering, yet they will not be found by engineering advances alone. Nor will the benefits be realized by the business-savvy executives, as the problems are human problems first and business problems second. Instead, the changes will be realized by designers, and by a specific breed of designers: those creative designers who are both artists and engineers and who are able to balance, over an extended period of time, technology and aesthetics without ever losing sight of the most important facet of design: humanity.
Interaction Design as a professional discipline
Interaction Design is recognized as a new field, but people have been designing interactions for centuries. The field has deeply embedded roots in various existing disciplines. The subject frequently gets confused with some of these other fields, many of which share common names, acronyms, or techniques.
Interaction Design isn't necessarily the creation of websites or applications. It isn't necessarily multimedia design or graphical user interface (GUI) design, and it doesn't even have to have a primary focus on advanced technology, although technology of some kind usually plays a significant role. A more appropriate, albeit academic, definition of the field better reflects the working practitioner as well as predicts the future of this exciting profession: Interaction Design is the creation of a dialogue between a person and a product, system, or service. This dialogue is both physical and emotional in nature and is manifested in the interplay between form, function, and technology as experienced over time.
A simpler way of thinking about Interaction Designers is that they are the shapers of behavior. Interaction Designers, whether practicing as Usability Engineers, Visual Interface Designers, or Information Architects, all attempt to understand and alter the things people do, the way they feel, and the things they think. It sounds manipulative—and it is. And because the manipulation of behavior is so tightly related to power, politics, and control, it's critical to reflect on the values that are being prescribed through our creations and to think carefully about the work we do.
The field of Interaction Design has been acknowledged as a structured and unique discipline only in the past 20 years, generally in keeping with the pervasiveness and nature of technological change. As communication and computing technology has increased in speed, function, and capability and decreased in size and cost, more and more consumer products can be found to contain some form of digitization. While this digital component frequently increases the overall utility of the product, it also serves to increase the complexity of the user experience. Thus, Interaction Designers find themselves performing usability evaluations on what were traditionally simple products, often in an attempt to ease the suffering of their end user. While Interaction Designers often work for the most financially motivated corporations, they frequently become the single champion for the consumer and spend a majority of their time trying to understand and model the user's goals as related to the business or technical goals.
Interaction Design borrows heavily from the field of cognitive psychology with regard to cognition, memory, and perception. It also draws equally from the world of art as it encompasses aesthetics and emotion. Successful Interaction Design influences a user on an emotional and highly personal level. In the same way that a painting can be challenging, a product can also evoke feelings and communicate meaning.
Interaction Design frequently gets confused with the design of websites or software, because people interact with websites and software and because digital development teams find value in having Interaction Designers working with them. Interaction Design also gets mislabeled by business owners as multimedia or interactive design. While designers of interactive media certainly should be skilled in the techniques and methods described in this text, interactive media is almost always technologically centered rather than human centered. The majority of professional multimedia development is constrained to a specific software package and the capabilities associated with that, rather than centered on the constraints of an end user. For example, a recent job posting for a “Manager, Interactive Creative” position requires “Adobe Photoshop, Adobe ImageReady, Adobe Illustrator, Flash, HTML, DHTML. Ability to learn and adapt to new technologies and software. Familiar with Macromedia Dreamweaver, Flash, and other similar programs. Understand and stay current with the capabilities of Internet-related technologies like: style-sheets, dynamic HTML, server-side programming, Jquery, Javascript, and Java.” These are technologies, and while the person who ends up filling this position most likely understands the value of human-centered design, the job description implies a company culture that is strongly computing centered. This tool-centeredness seems to indicate that a Design problem can be fixed by simply providing the right set of skills. In fact, the process of Design requires a rigorous methodology combined with a broad set of skills and a tremendous amount of passion.
Designing and shaping behavior
Interaction Design is complicated. It is closely related to a number of important disciplines like interactive design, product development, and marketing, and it encompasses many of these other fields. But the approach in the following pages attempts to reposition the field of Interaction Design away from a solely technical field or an artistic endeavor and instead toward a duality that emphasizes the human side of technology. An Interaction Designer must become an expert in how human beings relate to each other, and to the world, and to the changing nature of technology and business. This understanding of behavior is important now in a usability sense, as technology has afforded the creation of massively complicated systems and services that people have a hard time comprehending. The understanding of behavior becomes more important—and hopefully a great deal more fun—when the potential of Interaction Design is realized: when Interaction Designers stop being advocates for simply usable designs and begin to herald the creation of more poetic, culturally rich design solutions.
Creations that transcend usability are those that resonate deeply and profoundly and are those that make people feel passionately. A product has attributes that are distinguishing characteristics, and these characteristics make us feel a certain way. The object becomes a vehicle for the designer to speak with a viewer, much like a painter uses a canvas to communicate with an audience.
One of the main distinctions between art and design, however, may be the bidirectional nature of the communication. Interaction Design is a dialogue. A designer speaks, and the user speaks back. Over time, the communication becomes involved. This may occur as a product becomes older and worn or as a user becomes older and worn. Users change their innate responses to the object based on past experiences, perhaps through rote memorization or perhaps through a more associative integration of product into lifestyle. The ultimate goal of design, then, is to have a subtle, lasting, and intuitive dialogue with a person, the same sort of dialogue a married couple may share after years together—the type of dialogue that occurs at a glance and often without a great deal of rational introspection. Implicit dialogue means an internal monologue that is communicated through action. As we learn to intuitively use a product, we illustrate the scope of our past experiences with that product. This is in direct opposition to experience design. While we can mold activity through brute force or trial and error, Designers cannot create experiences with any degree of continuity. Instead, Interaction Designers exist to support experiences through the continual dialogue between people and products.
