In August 2003, five months after the second edition of About Face proclaimed the existence of a new design discipline called interaction design, Bruce “Tog” Tognazz-ini made an impassioned plea to the nascent community to create a nonprofit professional organization, and a mailing list and steering committee were founded shortly thereafter by Challis Hodge, David Heller, Rick Cecil, and Jim Jarrett. In September of 2005, IxDA, the Interaction Design Association (www.ixda.org) was officially incorporated. At the time of writing, it has over 2000 members in over 20 countries. We’re pleased to say that Interaction Design is finally beginning to come into its own as both a discipline and a profession.
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Why Call It Interaction Design?
The first edition of About Face described a discipline called software design and equated it with another discipline called user interface design. Of these two terms, user interface design has certainly had better longevity. We still use it occasionally in this book, specifically to connote the arrangement of widgets on the screen. However, what is discussed in this book is a discipline broader than the design of user interfaces. In the world of digital technology, form, function, content, and behavior are so inextricably linked that many of the challenges of designing an interactive product go right to the heart of what a digital product is and what it does.
As we’ve discussed, interaction designers have borrowed practices from more established design disciplines, but have also evolved beyond them. Industrial designers have attempted to address the design of digital products, but like their counterparts in graphic design, their focus has traditionally been on the design of static form, not the design of interactivity, or form that changes and reacts to input over time. These disciplines do not have a language with which to discuss the design of rich, dynamic behavior and changing user interfaces.
In recent years, a number of new terms have been proposed for this type of design.
As the World Wide Web gained prominence, information architecture (IA) emerged as a discipline dedicated to solving problems dealing with navigation to and the “findability” of content, mostly (though not exclusively) within the context of Web sites. While clearly a close relative of interaction design, mainstream IA still retains a somewhat limited, Web-centric view of organizing and navigating content using pages, links, and minimally interactive widgets. However, recent industry trends such as Web 2.0 and rich Internet applications have begun to open the eyes of Web designers, causing them to look beyond archaic browser interaction idioms.
We believe this awakening is bringing information architects’ concerns ever more closely in alignment with those of interaction designers.
Another term that has gained popularity is user experience (UX). There are many who advocate for the use of this term as an umbrella under which many different design and usability disciplines collaborate to create products, systems, and services. This is a laudable goal with great appeal, but it does not in itself directly address the core concern of interaction design as discussed in this volume: how specifically to design the behavior of complex interactive systems. While it’s useful to consider the similarities and synergies between creating a customer experience at a physical store and creating one with an interactive product, we believe there are specific methods appropriate to designing for the world of bits.
We also wonder whether it is actually possible to design an experience. Designers of all stripes hope to manage and influence the experiences people have, but this is done
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by carefully manipulating the variables intrinsic to the medium at hand. A graphic designer creating a poster uses an arrangement of type, photos, and illustrations to help create an experience, a furniture designer working on a chair uses materials and construction techniques to help create an experience, and an interior designer uses layout, lighting, materials, and even sound to help create an experience.
Extending this thinking to the world of digital products, we find it useful to think that we influence people’s experiences by designing the mechanisms for interacting with a product. Therefore, we have chosen Moggridge’s term, interaction design (now abbreviated by many in the industry as IxD), to denote the kind of design this book describes.
Of course, there are many cases where a design project requires careful attention to the orchestration of a number of design disciplines to achieve an appropriate user experience (see Figure 1). It is to these situations that we feel the term experience design is most applicable.
Content
Form
Information architects
Industrial designers
Copywriters
Graphic designers
Animators
Sound designers
Behavior
Interaction designers
Figure 1 One can think of user experience design (UX) of digital products as consisting of three overlapping concerns: form, behavior, and content. Interaction design is focused on the design of behavior, but is also concerned with how that behavior relates to form and content. Similarly, information architecture is focused on the structure of content, but is also concerned with behaviors that provide access to content, and the way the content is presented to the user. Industrial design and graphic design are concerned with the form of products and services, but also must ensure that their form supports use, which requires attention to behavior and content.
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Working with the Product Team
In addition to defining interaction design in terms of its primary concern with behavior and its relationships with other design disciplines, we also often find it necessary to define how interaction design should fit within an organization. We believe that establishing a rigorous product development process that incorporates design as an equal partner with engineering, marketing, and business management, and that includes well-defined responsibilities and authority for each group, greatly increases the value a business can reap from design. The following division of responsibilities, balanced by an equal division of authority, can dramatically improve design success and organizational support of the product throughout the development cycle and beyond:
The design team has responsibility for users’ satisfaction with the product. Many organizations do not currently hold anyone responsible for this. To carry out this responsibility, designers must have the authority to decide how the product will look, feel, and behave. They also need access to information: They must observe and speak to potential users about their needs, to engineers about technological opportunities and constraints, to marketing about opportunities and requirements, and to management about the kind of product to which the organization will commit.
The engineering team has responsibility for the implementation and fabrication of the product. For the design to deliver its benefit, engineering must have the responsibility for building, as specified, the form and behaviors that the designers define, while keeping on budget and on schedule. Engineers, therefore, require a clear description of the product’s form and behaviors, which will guide what they build and drive their time and cost estimates. This description must come from the design team. Engineers must also contribute to discussions of technical constraints and opportunities, as well as the feasibility of proposed design solutions.
The marketing team has responsibility for convincing customers to purchase the product, so they must have authority over all communications with the customer, as well as input into the product definition and design. In order to do this, the team members need access to information, including the results of designers’
research, as well as research of their own. (It’s worth noting that, as we discuss fu
rther in Chapters 4 and 5, customers and users are often different people with different needs.)
Management has responsibility for the profitability of the resulting product, and therefore has the authority to make decisions about what the other groups will work on. To make those decisions, management needs to receive clear information from the other groups: design’s research and product definition, marketing’s research and sales projections, and engineering’s estimations of the time and cost to create the product.
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What This Book Is and What It Is Not
In this book, we attempt to provide readers with effective and practical tools for interaction design. These tools consist of principles, patterns, and processes. Design principles encompass broad ideas about the practice of design, as well as rules and hints about how to best use specific user interface and interaction design idioms.
Design patterns describe sets of interaction design idioms that are common ways to address specific user requirements and design concerns. Design processes describe how to go about understanding and defining user requirements, how to then translate those requirements into the framework of a design, and finally how to best apply design principles and patterns to specific contexts.
Although books are available that discuss design principles and design patterns, few books discuss design processes, and even fewer discuss all three of these tools and how they work together to create effective designs. Our goal with this volume has been to create a book that weaves all three of these three tools together. While helping you design more effective and useful dialog boxes and menus, this book will simultaneously help you understand how users comprehend and interact with your digital product, and understand how to use this knowledge to drive your design.
Integrating design principles, processes, and patterns is the key to designing effective product interactions and interfaces. There is no such thing as an objectively good user interface—quality depends on the context: who the user is, what she is doing, and what her motivations are. Applying a set of one-size-fits-all principles makes user interface creation easier, but it doesn’t necessarily make the end result better. If you want to create good design solutions, there is no avoiding the hard work of really understanding the people who will actually interact with your product. Only then is it useful to have at your command a toolbox of principles and patterns to apply in specific situations. We hope this book will both encourage you to deepen your understanding of your product’s users, and teach you how to translate that understanding into superior product designs.
This book does not attempt to present a style guide or set of interface standards. In fact, you’ll learn in Chapter 14 why the utility of such tools is limited and relevant only to specific circumstances. That said, we hope that the process and principles described in this book are compatible companions to the style guide of your choice.
Style guides are good at answering what, but generally weak at answering why. This book attempts to address these unanswered questions.
We discuss four main steps to designing interactive systems in this book: researching the domain, understanding the users and their requirements, defining the framework of a solution, and filling in the design details. Many practitioners would
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add a fifth step: validation, testing the effectiveness of a solution with users. This is part of a discipline widely known as usability.
While this is an important and worthwhile component to many interaction design initiatives, it is a discipline and practice in its own right. We briefly discuss design validation and usability testing in Chapter 7, but urge you to refer to the significant and ever-growing body of usability literature for more detailed information about conducting and analyzing usability tests.
Changes from the Previous Editions
Much in the world of interface design has changed since the first edition of About Face was published in 1995. However, much remains the same. The third edition of About Face retains what still holds true, updates those things that have changed, and provides new material reflecting not only how the industry has changed in the last 11 years but also new concepts that we have developed in our practice to address the changing times.
Here are some highlights of the major changes you will find in the third edition of About Face:
The book has been reorganized to present its ideas in a more easy-to-use reference structure. The book is divided into three parts: The first deals with process and high-level ideas about users and design, the second deals with high-level interaction design principles, and the third deals with lower-level interface design principles.
The first part describes the Goal-Directed Design process in much greater detail than in the second edition, and more accurately reflects current practices at Cooper, including research techniques, the creation of personas, and how to use personas and scenarios to synthesize interaction design solutions.
Throughout the book, we attempt to more explicitly discuss visual interface design concepts, methods and issues, as well as issues related to a number of platforms beyond the desktop.
Terminology and examples in the book have been updated to reflect the current state of the art in the industry, and the text as a whole has been thoroughly edited to improve clarity and readability.
We hope that readers will find these additions and changes provide a fresh look at the topics at hand.
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Examples Used in This Book
This book is about designing all kinds of interactive digital products. However, because interaction design has its roots in software for desktop computers, and the vast majority of today’s PCs run Microsoft Windows, there is certainly a bias in the focus our discussions—this is where the greatest need exists for understanding how to create effective, Goal-Directed user interfaces.
Having said this, most of the material in this book transcends platform. It is equally applicable to all desktop platforms—Mac OS, Linux, and others—and the majority of it is relevant even for more divergent platforms such as kiosks, handhelds, embedded systems, and others.
A good portion of examples in this book are from the Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Internet Explorer, and Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator.
We have tried to stick with examples from these mainstream applications for two reasons. First, readers are likely to be at least slightly familiar with the examples.
Second, it’s important to show that the user interface design of even the most finely honed products can be significantly improved with a Goal-Directed approach. We have included a few examples from more exotic applications as well, in places where they were particularly illustrative.
A few examples in this new edition come from now moribund software or OS versions. These examples illustrate particular points that the authors felt were useful enough to retain in this edition. The vast majority of examples are from contemporary software and OS releases.
Who Should Read This Book
While the subject matter of this book is broadly aimed at students and practitioners of interaction design, anyone concerned about users interacting with digital technology will gain insights from reading this book. Programmers, designers of all stripes involved with digital product design, usability professionals, and project managers will all find something useful in this volume. People who have read earlier editions of About Face or The Inmates Are Running the Asylum will find new and updated information about design methods and principles here.
We hope this book informs you and intrigues you, but most of all, we hope it makes you think about the design of digital products in new ways. The practice of interaction design is constantly evolving
, and it is new and varied enough to generate a wide variety of opinions on the subject. If you have an interesting opinion or just want to talk to us, we’d be happy to hear from you at [email protected], [email protected], and [email protected].
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Part
I
Understanding
Goal-Directed Design
Chapter 1
Chapter 5
Goal-Directed Design
Modeling Users: Personas and
Goals
Chapter 2
Implementation Models and
Chapter 6
Mental Models
The Foundations of Design:
Scenarios and Requirements
Chapter 3
Beginners, Experts, and
Chapter 7
Intermediates
From Requirements to Design:
The Framework and Refinement
Chapter 4
Understanding Users: Qualitative
Research
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Goal-Directed Design
This book has a simple premise: If we design and construct products in such a way that the people who use them achieve their goals, these people will be satisfied, effective, and happy and will gladly pay for the products and recommend that others do the same. Assuming that this can be achieved in a cost-effective manner, it will translate into business success.
Alan Cooper, Robert Reinmann, David Cronin - About Face 3- The Essentials of Interaction Design (pdf) Page 4
