What makes up interaction design and what are some of the industry’s challenges?
According to the text by Jon Kolko, interaction design is defined as, “a creative process focused on people”. Further, a group at Carnegie Mellon University has created a formal framework for discovery during the design process. The process includes Define, Discover, Synthesize, Construct, Refine and Reflect components. A designer must first understand wants and needs and balance political requirements with the end user while also achieving business goals. Otherwise known as defining. Discovery allows a designer to gather data related to the given problem and understand who ultimately will use the creation. Both of these steps must be completed in order to move onward with your design, and also the structured process. Synthesize, Construct, and Refine fall next. These phases often get grouped together because of their similar nature and total time consumption. These steps include sketching ideas, creating personas and scenarios, mapping ideas to solve problems, testing prototypes among other things. Designers must work through creation and refinement over and over again during this time in attempt to extract the wrong ideas from their work and decide on a particular solution. The final step in this framework is Reflection, or the act of assessing success or failure. Regardless of the guidelines put in place, Interaction design is based on people and it is essential for designers to realize that. There are a lot of challenges being an interaction designer. In most companies, interaction designers are not involved in the beginning stages of product development at all. This type of work is left to business people who make decisions based solely on increasing profits or building brand equity. More collaboration should be established between designers and upper management. Another challenge that interaction designers face is the regulated funds they are allocated. The best elements of functionality may be costly to implement. When this is the case, designers become advocates for usability and attempt to convince superiors that it is worth the extra money to be user-friendlier. Interaction design may be difficult to grasp and implement, but creating a more user-oriented world is in the works.
What is interaction design, how it’s evolving. What fields does it draw knowledge from?
Just like many other aspects of the world are evolving, interaction design is no exception. A concept that correlates with interaction design very well is the idea of progressive learning. In order to be a successful interaction designer, one must be willing to learn new things everyday. For example, an accountant can get his degree in Accounting and thirty years later complete the same tasks without learning anything new. Opposite goes for interaction designers. Their job is evolving as the world’s like/dislikes and trends change. Interaction designers must change gathered information into meaningful data and incorporate that into their work. Interaction designers must also design for errors. When something is developed, every interaction with that product will not be the same and errors will occur. Errors related to the product itself and errors made by the user. Interaction designers must think deeply about the types of errors that could occur and effectively design for them.
Interaction Design draws knowledge from a few different fields. Some of the main fields of study this relates to are Psychology and Sociology. Both of these relate to human behavior. Psychology looks into the minds of humans and at their physical behavior and Sociology looks at humans social behavior. Interaction design deals a lot with its users and in-depth knowledge of humans could be very useful. Obviously basic knowledge of Design is very pertinent to this field of study as well.