Design: Interaction Design

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”—Arthur C. Clarke

People usually interpret Clarke’s quotation as a positive recognition of the power of technology. The new user interfaces (UIs) of gestures, voice, and chat aspire to magic, enabling people to control technology without any apparent, screen-based user interface. For some designers, this quotation also represents the future of user interfaces. Imran Chaudhri, UI designer for Apple’s iPhone has said:

“I see a natural progression from knobs and dials, to clicks and taps, to swipes and gestures, to voice and emotion.”

Magic is powerful, but as we all know, it also has a dark side. Could today’s trend toward magical user experiences that rely on gestures, voice, and chat spell doom for users? In this article, I’ll take you on a “Magical Mystery Tour” of these new user interfaces. Read More

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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