To your second point about the series being focused on interaction design for the Web, that’s certainly the plan as it stands. Although I agree that interactive design spans a variety of mediums, the Web is not only one of the most important of those mediums but also one of the most misunderstood. Whether or not we like it, browser-based interfaces are going to be with us for the foreseeable future. Rather than writing them off as “an unfortunate sidetrack” we should apply our skills and knowledge to make them as useful and satisfying as possible.

Perhaps we should have titled the article “Bringing Interaction Design to the Web”.

I’ll look forward to the remainder of the articles.

Kelli

- Commercial
- Residential
- Functional

Wait! Maybe we don’t need to cast this world into the dark shadows of technicalities just yet. Enter the magic concept of “specialization”. Oooh… imagine a world where architects are architects, and they magically focus their skill and expertise on the problems of specific industries.

Whoa! I better stop now before I am hunted down and pinned to the rack for being a puny simpleton.

There’s knowledge and tools important to ID; I for one would be happy to learn more about them.

This is true even for “traditional” print design. One of the key things that got hammered into me in design school is that “art is about expression, design is about communcation.”

That’s to say, art is essentially a monologue, you do it regardless of whether anyone’s listening. Design (or journalism, or writing ad copy) is more like giving a speech. The communication’s still essentially one-way, but you do try to be aware of who your audience is and how to best get your message through to them.

I’ll up the ante a bit — and throw in my contribution to the meme pool — and say that interaction design is like conversation. Your work needs to not only to “speak” to the user/audience, but also _listen and respond._ The latter two are in fact a defining difference of interactive design.

So you can no more do interactive design without being aware of/engaged with the person(s) you’re designing for than you can hold a conversation with an empty room.

Couldn’t agree more with both Adam and George’s comments. Design in general and certainly interactive design in particular, is fundamentally about communication. Therefore as professional communicators it’s up to the designer to ensure that their message is heard and understood by the receiver. It’s necessary then to have a firm, conscious, and articulated vision of who that receiver acutally is.

When I was working on ClarisWorks, all of us used to talk about whether the product would be appropriate for our mother. The unfortunate thing is that not only were we all lacking in knowledge of each other’s moms, we were also prone to shifting ideas of who even our own mother were. A problem that only years of therapy could effectively address.

The issue wasn’t that we didn’t have an idea of who we were designing for but rather we didn’t have a vision that WAS WRITTEN DOWN. The genius of the persona methodolgy isn’t the idea of directing your communication towards an archtypal user. The genius is that it requires you to faithfully record and articulate who that archetypal user is so you can make informed, conscious, and consistent design decisions.

So to answer Christina’s question and paraphrase George’s point: no, you can’t do interaction design without personas because designing in the absence of a conscious, articulated vision of your audience isn’t really design.

I think is difficult to break the boundaries of task performance inside a discipline-structure project development. I mean that it is difficult to determinate sometimes which job is for interaction designer or the experience designer or the information architecture or whoever.

But if we consider that we need to understand our audience to be able to design interactive products, then we need to understand aspects such as psychology, sociology, philosophy or technology. And can we understand this aspects of our audience without understanding another aspects such as context of use, ecology of artifacts or business strategy (for example)?

Klaus Krippendorff suggest to understand design as a making sense activity that focus on meaning. Where meaning is always construct by the different design contexts. In his work he focus in artifacts of industrial design and suggests four design contexts that will help to define the overall meaning of the artifact. Designing interactive products maybe the four design contexts will change but will still the same idea that the meaning of the artifacts is construct by the different design contexts variables that model interactive artifacts such as user cognitive model, business plan, context use….

With this i’m just trying to integrate, in a more formal way, the research process inside the design process and not just focussing on personas but rather in all facts that affects the meaning of situations. By situation i mean: the combination of circumstances at a given moment. (user and context circumstances)

An example of a integrative solution: http://bolullo.com/roberto/projects/topicoct2002.pdf

… And also how far the interaction designers need to understand about the user and context that model an interaction? I think this will depend on how people understands interaction and the different implications of design.

I think Interaction designers need to understand the enrionmental, philosophical, sociological, psychological and technological aspects that model the specific situations and therefore the user experience. And later focus on contributing to create the overall experience by focusing on the aspects related to the behaviour of the artifacts.

Information architecture is about content

Interaction design is about behavior

At the simplest level there’s five parts:
* the implied audience (in our case personas/scenarios)
* the author’s intent (what did you mean to say — i.e. Twain’s line about the difference between lightning and the lightning bug)
* the actual artifact (which can be interpreted in a “objective” manner, i.e. how many times was a word used, percentage of a painting that uses red, etc., although these tend to be the least interesting observations)
* the audience’s interpretation of the artifact (i.e. does the reader buy into the author’s intended effect — the essence of “camp” comes from the mismatch of intented and interpretation)
* the implied author (i.e. who the audience imagines the author to be, which in our case is important to branding)

Literary critics have gotten quite baroque in their theories and tend to focus on one to the exclusion of other, but those five factors are the essential ones.

As Bob mentioned, thinking of your audience/users isn’t new — as a journalist I was told to explain things so Auntie ‘Em in Kansas could understand it. As a print designer, creative briefs told me who the target audience was.

What’s different about personas (and scenarios which are equally important) is they’re both deeper and more formal both in the way that they’re developed and the way that they’re communicated among the team.

To me, one of the exciting things is taking some of the techniques from IA/ID applying them back to “traditional” fields, like graphic design and writing. In essense, they help craft a much tighter version of the traditional creative brief.

I guess, ultimately, good interaction design facilitates dialogue between the user and the system. It acts as both interpreter and translator.

On a related issue, Kelli mentioned above that separating IA and ID is a fruitless practice because “my IA role increasingly includes information architecture, interaction design, user interface design, content design, and all the requirements gathering and strategy normally associated with a business consultant as well. Not to mention sales!” Unfortunately, I feel it is this approach in our industry that produces so much garbage on the web. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. The reason we need to discuss and agree upon roles, is to be able to bring appropriate talents to bear at the right moment. As a graphic design professional for twelve years I have to know the ins and outs of my profession and everyone in it, designers, writers, illustrators, photographers, production, reprography, printers. Am I capable of playing any of these roles? Probably. Should I? Of course not, because it would detract from the end result.

How can we have a meaningful discussion about ID, and learn something from each other, unless we differentiate it from other roles? The discussion so far has been enlightening. I for one am looking forward to the rest of this series.