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Interaction Design, according to “Thoughts on Interaction Design,” is the creation of dialogue between user and product. “Elements of User Experience” gets a bit more poetic, and calls it a dance between the two of them. In any case, this “dialogue” or “dance” is a figurative description for interaction. Although this dialogue or dance is a 2-way interaction, designers need to plan the entire choreography beforehand. This means predicting user responses and designing accordingly. Unsurprisingly, then, Interaction Design borrows substantially from psychology. Beyond that, it also borrows from the fields of industrial design, engineering, art, and business strategy. Interaction Design obviously has plenty of similarities with a plethora of other types of design, however Interaction Design focuses on humanizing the end result and making it usable and intuitive. Some of the industry’s challenges can be viewed optimistically as opportunities. As new media pervades our culture and software development becomes outsourced, the job of the Interaction Designer becomes both more difficult and more sought after by companies. In a world full of variously sized rectangles that display pretty pictures, Interaction Design can serve as an improvement and differentiation.
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Ethnographic tools try to understand the what and why behind users’ actions. Ethnographic tools differ from traditional surveys or interviews in that they attempt to maintain the context of the actions – instead of asking the user in a controlled setting about their opinions on themselves, these tools try to understand these qualities in action. In the case of an online banking website, these tools can give the designer insight into how and why a user would use such a site. They might uncover useful information about which features are most helpful, which are in the way, and why a user usually logs on in the first place.
A design is finished when the designers are finished designing. Depending on the company and perspective, this could happen at a variety of points. For a particular designer, it could happen as soon as he throws it over the wall to the next group of designers, never to see it again. For a certain organization, design could be done when the product goes into manufacturing. For some products, design isn’t finished until it goes through several cycles of iterative development – and for other products, continued updates and support mean that design continues well after the product has been made commercially available. Success and purpose also depend on perspective. Some designs start out to fill a business purpose – the organization needs to make money or retaliate against a competitor, for example. Or, the design might have the purpose of providing the user some benefit. Maybe even both. The design is a success if it meets its purpose.
A product family I use is breakfast cereal, and a specific brand that I used to use regularly was Cinnamon Toast Crunch. Its branding affected me quite negatively when they released an ad campaign that not only personified the cereal, but characterized it as cannibalistic. Let this be a message to all advertisers of food: When I eat food, I don’t want to think about the prospect of eating a sentient being, as you have just advertised your food to be. Secondly, having your personified breakfast meal successfully recreate a miniature version of the Hunger Games in which the contestants eat each other does not make me want your product any more. In fact, it makes me want it quite less – less enough to the point where I haven’t bought the damn thing since your ad campaign was released. On another note, I do recall choosing several technological toys and devices as a child mainly based on their looks. This served as a good learning experience for me, as later in life I became much more concerned with functionality as opposed to aesthetics in technology.