Column: On Good Behavior

I’ve referred to the work I do as user experience design ever since Don Norman introduced the term at Apple in 1993—when I was a Human Interface Engineer there. But interaction design is absolutely central to the design of application user experiences—whether for the desktop, Web, mobile devices, or other handheld devices—and it is the core skill of application designers.

With this column, I’m introducing a multipart series on what I consider to be the essence of interaction design for application user experiences. First, I’ll lay the groundwork for this series by describing the role of interaction design, then I’ll embark on my exploration of the essence of interaction design by discussing the design of virtual contexts for interaction.

As I began thinking about this series, I realized I should describe the process of design first—or I’d end up constantly revisiting the same process issues—so I wrote my column “Design Is a Process, Not a Methodology.” Throughout this series, I’ll refer you to that column for details about steps of the design process that are especially important in solving particular types of design problems. Read More

Over the last few years, I’ve been noticing a disturbing trend in UX design: changes in the design of successful software user interfaces that actually degrade rather than enhance the user experience. This seems to happen for a variety of reasons—for example, because of

• designers conforming slavishly to current design trends such as minimalism or flat design rather than focusing on meeting users’ needs
• companies’ leaders wanting their UX designers to create “cool” rather than usable user interfaces
• UX teams not doing usability testing or other user research that would validate a new design approach rather than being committed to doing user-centered design
• designers disregarding the power of users’ kinesthetic memory when rethinking application layouts rather than giving it the respect that it warrants
• designers succumbing to the egotistical desire to put their personal stamp on the design of software user interfaces rather than recognizing and preserving the value that products have long provided to users
• designers making changes for the sake of change alone rather than strategically driving change to deliver greater value to users
• companies engaging in feature wars with their competitors—causing their software user interfaces to become bloated with unnecessary features—rather than striving to differentiate their offerings in the marketplace
• companies crafting user experiences that selfishly further their business goals rather than deriving business value by meeting users’ needs better
• companies releasing software whose quality is not up to snuff because they’ve rushed it to market without adequate testing and debugging

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My last column, “Specifying Behavior,” focused on the importance of interaction designers’ taking full responsibility for designing and clearly communicating the behavior of product user interfaces. At the conclusion of the Design Phase for a product release, interaction designers’ provide key design deliverables that play a crucial role in ensuring their solutions to design problems actually get built. These deliverables might take the form of high-fidelity, interactive prototypes; detailed storyboards that show every state of a user interface in sequence; detailed, comprehensive interaction design specifications; or some combination of these. Whatever form they take, producing these interaction design deliverables is a fundamental part of a successful product design process.

In this installment of On Good Behavior, I’ll provide an overview of a product design process, then discuss some indispensable activities that are part of an effective design process, with a particular focus on those activities that are essential for good interaction design. Although this column focuses primarily on activities that are typically the responsibility of interaction designers, this discussion of the product design process applies to all aspects of UX design. Read More