Comments on Just How Far Beyond HCI is Interaction Design?

sherlock_yoda — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:03 GMT

I have recently been reading Norman’s book ‘The Invisible Computer’, where he discusses the idea of gadgets or computer technology becoming seen as products (like TVs, radios, fridges, etc). The computer part will be invisible – we will stop thinking of things in terms of technology, computers, operating systems, etc.

Perhaps this is the goal of interaction design – to stop people worrying about interfaces/computers and to see things as products – simple devices/tools that help us get things done. Maybe we should call ourselves ‘product designers’. This term also hints at a broad notion of design including the design of visuals, interactions, functional elements and maybe even manuals, boxes, marketing etc. I think this may be a better term than ‘user experience designer/director’...this is too ‘techy’ or ’.com’ a term.

I think MicroSoft went this way a long time ago. I think they have Product Managers who have overall responsibility for the direction/quality of a product – the overall user experience.

Just some thoughts popping into my head…

Sherlock

sherlock_yoda — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:03 GMT

I just wanted to clarify one of my earlier points – especially with regard to George’s comments.

When I was talking about design, I wasn’t referring to graphic design, artistic design, visual design or anything creative or ‘wacky’. I was talking about product design – i.e. the practice of solving problems within a particular context with particular constraints. The closest analogies being either industrial design or perhaps architecture.

George said,
My professional practice is all about designing (mostly) digital tools that help people accomplish goals—I call that “software interaction design”
This is what I was also referring to.

My criticism was that many people from standard academic HCI backgrounds don’t have much practice in this form of design. They may know some theory and they may know some requirements and testing methodologies, but they don’t have much practice in going through the complete design cycle. This is what traditional design courses are good at (be that visual design, graphic design, industrial design) – they ensure that all graduates leaving their courses have designed 100s of small design projects, which are then subjected to peer/tutor review. In a nutshell, I think HCI or interaction design education should be at least half practical (intense practical at that), as well as academic. Winograd in ‘Bringing Design to Software’ makes these points much more eloquently than I do.

I am not pointing the finger at HCI professionals. I am pointing the finger at our current education practices. We do not teach this stuff properly. Ideally, there would also be some elements of apprenticeship/mentoring for developing interaction designers – this is currently very hard to find.

As The King said, “A little less conversation, a little more action..” :0)

Sherlock

Roberto Bolullo — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:03 GMT

I think we have to make a closer look just to the name itself to have a deeper understanding of the discipline.

Interaction: interaction is a process of continual action and reaction between two parties (whether living or machines). It is debatable whether or not a computer is capable of actually initiating action rather than merely reacting through its programming. (Nathan Shedroff (2001) “Experience Design” , New readears)

Design: The design etymology goes back to the Latin of + signare and means making something, distinguishing it by a sign, giving it significance, designating its relation to other things, owners, users, or gods. Based on their original meaning, one could say: “I design is making sense (of the things)”. (Krippendorff, K (1989) “On essential contexts of artifacts or on the proposition that “Design is making sense (of things)” Design Issues, 5(2), pp. 9-39)

Interaction design: we could extract then that an Interaction design is dedicate to define partier’s behaviour with “sense”. Then we could say that thru the understanding of the context, the designer defines the behaviour of products, services and environments.

And with this definitions we can talk a lot about interaction design and its practice: new methods and practices to gain specific needs, integration of all features that affects the behaviour from the business, user, social and production-consumption perspective, design discipline, etc…
For me the most important issue for Interaction design is to try to separate definitely form the idea that is a digital issue because if not we are just envisioning the 10% of its full potential.
bolullo.com/roberto/projects/id.pdf

I wrote an essay in my school years (not long ago) about what is interaction design and give some examples for inspiration. You can see at:

Roberto Bolullo
bolullo.com/roberto

Robert Reimann — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:02 GMT

Well, to quote myself (since Frank was so kind as to include a link to my article in his response), I proposed that interaction design is the design of the BEHAVIOR of artifacts, systems, and environments (and is thus also concerned with how form supports that behavior). The fact that interaction design focuses on behavior requires it to use a new set of methods and practices, because traditional design disciplines and methods address concerns of form and content, but not those of behavior. Interaction design is considered most often in the context of digital systems because such systems generally exhibit behaviors complex enough to be worthy of design (a toothbrush has little behavior that isn’t evident by inspecting it; inspecting the physical shell of a computer tells you nothing of its very sophisticated behaviors).

Note that “behavior” does not necessarily imply support of goals in the narrow sense of “enhanced productivity” or the like. Having fun is also a human goal, and a game’s behavior is what creates a sense of fun. Game designers don’t often call themselves interaction designers, but I would propose that this is precisely what they are doing in their specific domain. While I think there are many distinct principles and patterns that come into play in the design of interactive entertainment vs. productivity applications, I believe that the broad *process* of designing behaviors could be generally applicable even to the interaction design of games.

We need a broad a definition for interaction design, because interactive systems do not stop at tools and productivity applications, but extend to entertainment, community-building, and potentially outside the digital arena altogether (design of human-organization interaction for example). Digital systems are the most prevalent, but certainly not the only entities that could benefit from the process and results of interaction design.

Robert M. Reimann
Director of Design R&D
Cooper | Humanizing Technology

George Schneiderman — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:02 GMT

As long as everyone else is picking on HCI professionals, I’m going to pick on design professionals. In my experience, most graphic designers and even many web designers don’t know or care about users or their goals. They see themselves as artists out to create beauty, not as craftspeople out to create useful tools. It seems to me that in many respects HCI provides a much more solid foundation on which to build an interaction design profession than does, say, graphic design. (Which isn’t to say that graphic design doesn’t have important contributions to make.)

The techniques that I bring to a problem as a software interaction designer are all oriented around providing users with tools to accomplish something—tools which will be easy to learn and remember, and efficient, pleasant, and powerful in use. I have nothing against games or digital art projects, but their design has little to do with my practice as a software interaction designer. My professional practice is all about designing (mostly) digital tools that help people accomplish goals—I call that “software interaction design”. Maybe “interaction design” isn’t the right term for that, and should be defined more broadly as Jonas proposes. But I believe that the term as I use it does define a coherent professional discipline which needs its own label.

As far as innovation: I may design products to meet goals that users don’t even have yet. But to do so successfully I still need to understand my potential users well enough to envision what goals they might form once we provide them with enabling tools.

PS I just got back from CHI, the annual meeting of the premier academic/professional conference for HCI people. Interestingly enough, during one of the panel discussions (“CHI at 20”), Don Norman made the assertion that for HCI to move forward as a professional discipline it needs to figure out how to apply itself to product design.

Andrew H Otwell — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:02 GMT

Agreed, Sherlock. Most HCI folks learn nothing about “good visual design,” or the marketing aspects of design. HCI is essentially a research field, building a continually evolving body of knowledge through incremental, experimentally verified tests. It’s evolutionary, and rarely revolutionary or innovative. Some of that work is by definition opposite to some necessary aspects of Design, for example the perfectly legitimate design requirement of “make it look cool.”

While the results of that work are useful to designers, that work *is not* design. There shouldn’t be any pretense that HCI practicioners are designers any more than Art Historians are Artists. Designers work for clients, most research HCI does not. Designers must take into account the needs of their clients’ businesses, not just the needs of the client’s users.

sherlock_yoda — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:02 GMT

I think the notion of ‘interaction design’ has been useful in bringing to light the fact that many HCI professionals don’t actually know how to create excellent or innovative products (sensing impending outrage, I better qualify this…)

Many HCI professionals I know and have know are excellent in contextual requirements analysis, in creating scenarios and testing existing designs or prototypes. However, put them in front of a blank piece of paper and they really have little better ability to do an initial design than a lay-person. They end up using the ‘throw it at the wall and see if it sticks’ methodology discussed by both Nielsen and Cooper. This might create an adequate solution that would be better than solutions produced by people with a less user-focused perspective, but it will never create a great solution.

I think one strong reason for the fact that many HCI professionals cannot design, is because HCI courses rarely teach design, especially in a practical way. Winograd discusses this eloquently in his book ‘bringing design to software’. He feels that HCI or interaction design needs to be taught in a similar way to other design – i.e. using a ‘workshop’ methods where students do lots of realistic projects which are then subjected to peer/tutor review. This is very different to academic/theoretical learning. It is doing not reading. It is also building up experience and learning to question oneself.

Sherlock

frank elbert — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:02 GMT

I quote Jonas:
“I think what the designer is trying to do is to envision things for users that the users can’t yet envision. The hard part is not fixing little problems, but designing things that are both innovative and that work.”

Well, isn’t this exactly what, for example, IDEO and Cooper does for a living for a long time?

Cooper about interaction design: “It is a synthesis, however—more than a sum of its parts, with its own unique methods and practices. It is also very much a design discipline, with a different approach than that of scientific and engineering disciplines.” www.natzke.com or examples of good interaction design)