Following excerpt from: Designing for Interaction: Creating Innovative Applications and Devices by Dan Saffer (in our library)
Also: http://www.designingforinteraction.com/

______________________________________________
Every moment of every day, millions of people send e-mail, talk on mobile phones, instant message each other, record TV shows on digital video recorders (DVRs), and listen to music on MP’3 players. All of these things are made possible by good engineering. But it’s interaction design that makes them usable, useful, and fun. You benefit from good interaction design every time you:

• Go to an automatic teller machine (ATM) and withdraw cash with a few simple touches on a screen.
• Become engrossed in a computer game.
• Cut and paste cells on a spreadsheet.
• Buy something online.
• Twitter from your mobile phone.
• Update your status on Facebook.

But the reverse is often also true. We suffer from poor interaction design all around us. Thousands of Interaction design problems wait to be
solved — such as when you:

• Try to use the self-checkout at a grocery store and it takes you half an hour.
• Can’t get your car to tell you what’s wrong with it when it breaks down.
• Wait at a bus stop with no idea when the next bus will arrive.
• Struggle to synchronize your mobile phone to your computer.
• Can’t figure out how to set the clock in your microwave oven

______________________________________________
Any time behavior — how a product works — is involved,
interaction designers could be involved. Indeed, for the best
experience, they should be involved. Back in 1990, Bill
Moggridge, a principal of the design firm IDEO, realized that for
some time he and some of his colleagues had been creating a
very different kind of design. It wasn’t product design exactly,
but they were definitely designing products. Or was it
communication design, although they used some of that
discipline’s tools a well. It wasn’t computer science either,
although a lot of it had to do with computers and software. No,
this was something different. It drew on all those disciplines,
but was something else, and it had to do with connecting
people through the products they used. Moggridge called this
new practice interaction design.

______________________________________________
What Are Interactions and Interaction Design?

Although we experience examples of good and bad interaction design every day, interaction design as a discipline is tricky to define. In part, this is the result of its interdisciplinary roots: in industrial and communication design, human factors, and human-computer interaction. It’s also because a lot of interaction design is invisible, functioning behind the scenes. Why do the Windows and Mac operating systems, which basically do the same thing and can, with some tinkering, even look identical, feel so different? Interaction design is about behavior, and behavior is much harder to observe and understand than appearance. It’s much easier to notice and discuss a garish color than a subtle transaction that may, over time, drive you crazy. An interaction, grossly speaking, is a transaction between two entities, typically an exchange of information, but it can also be an exchange of goods or services. This book is called Designing for Interaction because it is this sort of exchange that interaction designers try to engender in their work. Interaction designers design for the possibility of interaction. The interaction itself takes place between people, machines, and systems, in a variety of combinations.

Three Ways of Looking at Interaction Design
There are three major schools of thought when it comes to defining interaction design:
• A technology-centered view.
• A behaviorist view.
• The Social Interaction Design view.

What is common about all three views is that interaction design is seen as an art-an applied art, like furniture making; it’s not a science, although some tried and true rules have emerged. Interaction design is by its nature contextual: it solves specific problems under a particular set of circumstances using the available materials. For example, even though a 1994 Mosaic browser was an excellent piece of interaction design, you wouldn’t install it on your computer now. It served its purpose for its time and context.

Like other applied arts, such as architecture, interaction design involves many methods and methodologies in its tasks, and ways of working go in and out of vogue and often compete for dominance. Currently, a very user centered design methodology in which products are generated with users is in style, but this hasn’t always been the case, and recently these methods have been challenged. Microsoft performs extensive user testing and research; Apple, known for its innovative interaction design, does very little.

The Technology-Centered View — Interaction designers make technology, particularly digital technology, useful, usable, and pleasurable to use. This is why the rise of software and the Internet was also the rise of the field of interaction design. Interaction designers take the raw stuff produced by engineers and programmers and mold it into products that people enjoy using.

The Behaviorist View — As Jodi Forlizzi and Robert Reimann succinctly put it in 1999 in their presentation “Interaction Designers: What we are, what we do, & what we need to know,” interaction design is about “defining the behavior of artifacts, environments, and systems (for example, products).” This view focuses on functionality and feedback: how products behave and provide feedback based on what the people engaged with them are doing.

The Social/Interaction Design View — The third, and broadest, view of interaction design is that it is inherently social, revolving around facilitating communication between humans through products. This perspective is sometimes called Social Interaction Design. Technology is nearly irrelevant in this view; any kind of object or device can make a connection between people. These communications can take many forms; they can be one-to-one as with a telephone call, one-to-many as with a blog, or many-to-many as with the stock market.

Why Interaction Design?

The term “design” can be difficult to get a handle on. Consider this infamous sentence by design history scholar John Heskett: “Design is to design a design to produce a design.” People have many preconceived notions about design, not the least of which is that design concerns only how things look: design as decoration or styling. And while there is nothing wrong with appealing aesthetics, design can be more than that. Communication (graphic) and industrial design bring ways of working that interaction designers embrace as well. Here are some of the approaches that interaction design employs:

Focusing on Users — Designers know that users don’t understand or care how the company that makes a product is run and structured. They care about doing their tasks and achieving their goals within their limits. Designers are advocates for end users.

Finding Alternatives — Designing isn’t about choosing among multiple options — it’s about creating options, finding a “third option” instead of choosing between two undesirable ones. This creation of multiple possible solutions to problems sets designers apart. Consider, for example, Google’s AdWords. The company needed advertising for revenue, but users hated traditional banner ads. Thus, designers came up with a third approach: text ads.

Using Ideation and Prototyping — Designers find their solutions through brainstorming and then, most important, building models to test the solutions. Certainly, scientists and architects and even accountants model things, but design involves a significant difference: design prototypes aren’t fixed. Any particular prototype doesn’t necessarily represent the solution, only a solution. It’s not uncommon to use several prototypes to create a single product. Jeff Hawkins, designer of the original Palm Pilot, famously carried around small blocks of wood, pretending to write on them and storing them in his shirt pocket until he came upon the right size, shape, and weight for the device.

Collaborating and Addressing Constraints — Few designers work alone. Designers usually need resources (money, materials, developers, printers, and so on) to produce what they dream up, and these resources come with their own constraints. Designers seldom have carte blanche to do whatever they want. They must address business goals, compromise with teammates, and meet deadlines. Designing is almost always a team effort.

Creating Appropriate Solutions — Most designers create solutions that are appropriate only to a particular project at a particular point in time. Designers certainly carry experience and wisdom from one project to the next, but the ultimate solution should uniquely address the issues of that particular problem. This is not to say that the solution (the product) cannot be used in other contexts — experience tells us it can and will be — but that the same exact solution cannot (or shouldn’t anyway) be exactly copied for other projects. Amazon has a great ecommerce model, but it can’t be exactly replicated elsewhere (although pieces of it certainly can be); it works well within the context of the Amazon site. Design solutions have to be appropriate to the situation.

______________________________________________

Final excerpt from: Thoughts on Interaction Design: A Collection of Reflections written and compiled by Jon Kolko (in our library)

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. As such, 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. 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 form, function, and technology.

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 shape human behavior. This is the purpose of the profession: to change the way people behave.

The field of Interaction Design has been acknowledged as a structured and unique discipline only in the past twenty 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 psychology with regard to cognition, memory, and perception. It also draws equally from the world of art and design as it encompasses aesthetics and emotion. Successful Interaction Design affects a user on an emotional and highly personal level; a painting can be challenging, and so can an interactive product.

Interaction Design frequently gets confused with the design of websites, because people interact with websites and because web 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 around 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, 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 this diverse 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, 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 towards a duality that emphasizes the human side of technology. The 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 which 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 design solutions.

Creations that transcend “usability” are those that resonate deeply and profoundly, and are those that make people feel passionately. We can consider a product as having attributes that are distinguishing characteristics, and these characteristics make us feel a certain way. The object becomes a vehicle tor the designer to speak with a viewer, much like a painter uses a canvas 10 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. The 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 are in fact illustrating the scope of our past experiences with it. This is in direct opposition with “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.

______________________________________________