So, after a lot of confusing descriptions of it scattered over the Internet, I thought i’d include mine:

WHAT IS IT?

Imagine a product of some kind. It could be a service, such as a search engine, a system like a computer game or a device like a mobile phone. We use these products, we ‘interact’ with them. But:

• how do we know do we know how to interact with them? i.e. ‘I’ve loaded this search engine, now how do I search?’

• how do we know why the product is acting a certain way? i.e. ‘why is it vibrating?’

• how is the product trying to communicate back with us? i.e. ‘how do I know someone is ringing my phone and who?’

• How does the product ‘know’ what we want? i.e. predictive text on a mobile (maybe not the best example!).

Interaction design, to me, is an accumulation of different skills, practices and processes (now referred to as ‘tools’) that focus on developing how a system, service or technology (now referred to as a ‘product’) behaves and, in the future, understands how a Human User is interfacing with it. You could consider those operations to be the unseen, internal workings of the design. On the flip side, Interaction Design also focuses on how the Human User can communicate with the product via the interface allowing user and product to function together.

The aim for an interaction designer is to: create a simple, clear and straightforward solution for easy and intuitive interaction (communication) between the product and the Human User in order to create a better, smoother systems, services and/or technology we use everyday.

INTERACTION DESIGN MAKES PRODUCTS EASILY USABLE BY HUMANS :)

This Human familiarity and usability given to the products can make it easy for people to interact through the product too, if the product facilitates user-to-user interaction.

THE TOOLS INTERACTION DESIGNERS USE:

I shall do a separate post on these! Just remember Interaction Design, to my mind, is not a separate, specific practice: it’s accumulation of many different practices and mind sets in order to design and create truly interactive, easy-to-use products for people to use.
 

THE FUTURE (advanced reading only, ha ha!)

In the future Interaction Design shouldn’t only be about how the product behaves to communicate clearly with the User, i.e. vibrating to signal a call is being made into their mobile phone. It is my belief  that in the future Interaction Design will facilitate the actual design of Intelligence and awareness into a product. It will not only mimic behaviors Humans can understand but it will also genuinely understand their Users via the ability to create invariant experiences using a ‘memory-prediction framework’, within the limitations of the tools the products are given to operate, much like how we work, i.e. we store memories from experience and use them to make predictions of the world around us and use our bodies to function.

The interaction designer will still be designing the behaviors and the guidelines for that behavior  to create simple, clear services for Users to follow, however they will have a greater range of tools, such as the ability for the product to communicate with the user through, as an example, fluid, human speech.

Crazy, huh?!

I’ll look more into this in the future, as how I’ve explained it is rather vague.

SO! that’s it! In the future I’ll do examples of good and bad interaction design as well as the tools that are used by the designer and my thoughts on them! :)