What makes up interaction design and what are some of the industry’s challenges?
Interaction Designers are doing more than using technology to solve a problem. They are an expect on how human beings relate to each other, to the world, and to the changing nature of technology and business. Their creations should become vehicles to provide a dialogue between the designer and the viewer. This design is a dialogue. And getting to the point where a designer can honestly form a dialogue with a user is hard. There are six steps: Define, discover, synthesize, construct, refine, and reflect. These steps allow the designers to properly hypothesize scenarios and interactions that will exist with their product as well as evaluate what aspects of the design either need to be implemented or removed. This is important as hypothesizing scenarios allows the designers to contemplate their users. Empathizing with their users is important as interaction design is about humanity. The products should be focused on the human users, not the technology used to create the product.
Some unique challenges arise due to the human focus of the field. The industry is currently focused on technology, as it’s rapidly growing and there’s so much to know and do in order to become successful. So when hiring designers, they make job postings about HTML, Java, the Adobe Suite, and so on instead of what really matters: the ability to empathize with the user. And empathizing with a user isn’t as easy at it sounds either, it’s truly a tough task. A designer can only go so far before they need to do testing with their prototypes with real users. Designers will always believe that their designs are good because they know everything about them and have spend hours navigating the ins and outs of their work. Real users are never that involved in a product. The product should be able to effectively communicate with the user without distracting or humiliating them. A good design does not make a user feel stupid. A good design should be a perfect interaction between user and product, like an old, married couple that don’t even need to speak to understand each other. And the industry just doesn’t understand that. They hear interaction design and assume they have a computer scientist and graphic designer all in one, which leads them to focus on the technology and less about the people.
What is interaction design, how its evolving. What fields does it draw knowledge from?
“Interaction design is a creative process focused on people” (page 20.) It is the creation of a dialogue between a person and a product. The dialogue doesn’t need to be lengthy and involved, as we interact with a number of things naturally without even realizing it. The way we sit in chairs, how we hold our silverware, if we use just one strap or both when we sling our backpacks on our backs… these are all interactions. We may not do what was intended by the designers, which is why design is seen in the fourth dimension, which includes time. Over time we will act differently with our products or we may not even interact with them at all. Landfills are just filling up with iPhones and dead technology because there’s nothing about it to keep it around. It’s not intended to last. And this is why interaction designers are working on better ways to communicate with their audience to create products that will meet user needs and become devices that no longer trouble or inhibit the user from completing their tasks.
Interaction design draws knowledge from several fields. Computer Science, Psychology, Engineering, and Graphic Design are the main fields. Designers must be able to interact with the user on any platform, with a physical product or through the use of technology. They need to be able to understand and empathize with the behavior of their users, to the point where they understand their users better than they understand themselves. And finally, they need to be able to engineer and construct products that match the vision they have created and ensure that the product properly converses with the user in an effective and clear manner.