Interaction design
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Interaction Design (IxD or IaD) is the discipline of defining and creating the behavior of technical, biological, environmental and organizational systems. Examples of these systems are software, products, mobile devices, environments, services, wearables, and even organizations themselves. Interaction design defines the behavior (the "interaction") of an artifact or system in response to its users over time.
Interaction designers are typically informed by user research, design with an emphasis on behavior as well as form, and evaluate design in terms of usability and emotional factors.
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[edit] Why interaction design?
As products and experiences become more complicated or gain new capabilities, designers face new challenges in helping users use them effectively.
Often, new technologies are complex to their intended users. Interaction design aims to minimize the learning curve and increase the accuracy and efficiency of task completion, without diminishing the value a product's useful functionality. This can lead to less frustration, higher productivity, and higher satisfaction for users.
Interaction design improves the usability and experience of the object or system, by first researching and understanding user's goals, expectations, behaviors, and needs and then deliberately design to meet and exceed these needs and desires for designated user groups.
[edit] Relationship with User Interface Design
Interaction Design is often associated with the design of system interfaces in a variety of media (see also: User Interface Design, Interface Design, Experience Design) but concentrates on the aspects of the interface that define and present its behavior over time, with a focus on developing the system to respond to the user's experience and not the other way around. The system interface can be thought of as the artifact (whether visual or other sensory) that represents an offering's designed interactions. Interactive voice response (Telephone User Interface) is an example of interaction design without graphical user interface as a media.
Interactivity, however, is not limited to technological systems. People have been interacting with each other as long as humans have been a species. Therefore, interaction design can be applied to the development of all solutions (or offerings), such as services and events. Those who design these offerings have, typically, performed interaction design inherently without naming it as such.
[edit] History
Interaction design was first proposed by Bill Moggridge in the late 1980s. It was called "SoftFace" and later renamed "Interaction Design". IDEO, a design consultancy co-founded by Moggridge, is one of the most established companies working in the field.
In 1989, Gillian Crampton-Smith established an interaction design MA at the Royal College of Art in London (originally entitled "computer-related design" and now known as "design interactions"). In 2001, she helped found the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, a small institute in Northern Italy dedicated solely to interaction design. Today, interaction design is taught in many schools worldwide.
[edit] General Steps in Interaction Design
There is a general process that most interaction designers follow, the point of which is to create a solution (not the solution) to a known problem. A key element in this process is the idea of iteration, where the aim is to build quick prototypes and test them with the users to make sure the proposed solution is satisfactory.
Here, briefly, are the major steps in most interaction designers' process:
[edit] Design Research
Using design research techniques (observations, interviews, and activities) designers investigate users and their environment in order to learn more about them and thus be better able to design for them.
[edit] Concept Generation
Drawing on a combination of user research, technological possibilities, and business opportunities, designers create concepts for new software, products, services, or systems. This process may involve multiple rounds of brainstorming, discussion, and refinement.
[edit] Creation of Scenarios/Personas/Profiles
From the patterns of behavior observed in the research, designers create scenarios (or user stories) or storyboards, which imagine a future state of the product or service. Often the designer will first create personas or user profiles from which the scenarios are built.
[edit] Wireframing and Flow Diagrams
The features and functionality of a product or service are often outlined in a document known as a wireframe ("schematics" is an alternate term). Wireframes are a page-by-page or screen-by-screen detail of the system, which include notes ("annotations") as to how the system will operate. Flow Diagrams outline the logic and steps of the system or an individual feature.
[edit] Prototyping and User Testing
Interaction designers use a variety of prototyping techniques to test aspects of design ideas. These can be roughly divided into three classes: those that test the role of an artifact, those that test its look and feel and those that test its implementation. Sometimes, these are called experience prototypes to emphasize their interactive nature. Prototypes can be physical or digital, high- or low-fidelity.
[edit] Implementation
Interaction designers need to be involved during the development of the product or service to ensure that what was designed is implemented correctly. Often, changes need to be made during the building process, and interaction designers should be involved with any of the on-the-fly modifications to the design.
[edit] System Testing
Once the system is built, often another round of testing, for both usability and errors ("bug catching") is performed. Ideally, the designer will be involved here as well, to make any modifications to the system that are required.
[edit] Interaction Design Principles
Certain basic principles of cognitive psychology provide grounding for interaction design. These include concepts such as mental models, mapping, metaphors, and affordances. Many of these were influentially laid out in the book The Design Of Everyday Things.
[edit] Interaction Design Domains
Interaction designers work in many areas, including software interfaces, physical products, environments, services, and systems which may combine many of these. Each area requires its own skills and approaches, but there are aspects of interaction design common to all.
[edit] Interdisciplinary Process
Interaction designers often work in interdisciplinary teams as their work requires expertise in many different domains, including graphic design, programming, psychology, user testing, product design, etc (see below for more related disciplines). Thus, they need to understand enough of these fields to work effectively with specialists.
[edit] Social Interaction Design
Social interaction design (SxD) is emerging due to the fact that many of our computing devices have become networked and have begun to integrate communication capabilities. Phones, digital assistants and the myriad of connected devices from computers to games facilitate talk and social interaction. Social interaction design accounts for interactions among users as well as between users and their devices. The dynamics of interpersonal communication, speech and writing, the pragmatics of talk and interaction--these now become critical factors in the use of social technologies. And they are factors described less by an approach steeped in the rational choice approach taken by cognitive science than that by sociology, psychology, and anthropology.
Virtual world is an example of a system relying heavily on social interaction design. Social interaction in the community, gathering and teamwork are also some examples of activities that can be designed by social interaction design.
[edit] See also
- Computer supported cooperative work
- Design methods
- Ethnography
- Experience design
- Human-computer interaction
- Human factors
- Industrial design
- Information architecture
- Interface design
- Participatory design
- Usability
- User-centered design
- User interface design
[edit] References
- Alan Cooper: About Face 2.0: The Fundamentals of Interaction Design
- Brenda Laurel: Design Research: Methods and Practice, MIT Press, ISBN 0-262-12263-4
- Bill Moggridge: Designing Interactions
- Donald Norman: The Design of Everyday Things, ISBN 0-465-06710-7
- Dan Saffer: Designing for Interaction: Creating Smart Applications and Clever Devices, ISBN 0-321-43206-1
[edit] External links
- Bruce Tognazzini's First Principles of Interaction Design
- Design Patterns in Interaction Design
- Designing Interactions: Interviews - conversations with key figures in interaction design
- Interaction-Design.org - an open-content, peer-reviewed Encyclopedia covering Interaction Design and related fields.
- Interaction Design Patterns in Games
- Introducing Interaction Design - Boxes and Arrows
- Usability News
- Organizations
