Defining Interaction Design, Part I

A good reference to anyone involved in professional interaction design would be About Face 2.0 The Essentials of Interaction Design. The authors Alan Cooper & Robert Reimann recognize four main steps when designing interactive systems:

• researching the domain
• understanding the users and their requirements
• defining the framework of a solution
• filling in the design details

There is many good stuff on usability (Don't Make Me Think being a favorite of mine).

    [...] but there is comparatively little in print about interaction design.

As a professional Front-End developer I am frequently confronted with the underestimated and undervalued position Interaction Design gets in relatively large software building projects. As I am as passionate about my job as I am about the quality of our products, I have been trying to get the message accross on how design and functionality should be balanced, instead of design being an afterthought.

About Face 2.0 says it dead on:

The lack of consistent, specific terminology in the world of interaction design frustrates the efforts of designers. Without precise terminology, we are forced to hand-wave. [...] Not only can't we function effectively but our credibility to the outsoder world -particularly to the worlds of software engineering and business- is threatened unless we can agree on terms that describe what we do, what we care about, and how to judge our relative success at achieving our goals.    

People refer to me as Graphical Designer. This description is open for immediate misinterpretation, which is probably one of the most important reasons why design is undervalued. People tend to think of us as designers, designing stuff with colors and making things look 'good', rather than making things usable.

Interaction Designer, in my opinion, is a far better description, because it implies thinking from a point of view where someone has to operate (interact) some thing (or process) on a daily bases. About Face 2.0 writes:

Interaction Design is the definition and design of the behavior of artifacts, environments, and systems, as well as the formal elements that communicate that behaviour.

This description engages the issues around Interaction Design since it does not primarily focus on form, content and meaning, but also on the way things behave and how they should be designed in such a way people can effectively, intuitively and pleasantly interact with them.

Because the behaviors of complex systems are often not a matter of aesthetics, but rather one of cognitive factors and logical processes, interaction design is both amendable to and greatly aided by a systematic approach. Interaction designers need, first and foremost, to understand the goals, motivations and expectations of the people for whom they [...] design.

With rich web applications arising, I sense Interaction Designers might get a more prominent role in the development process, as client's will demand better usability, intuitive interfaces and things that will be usable for the masses.

About Face 2.0: The Essentials of Interaction Design

	First published in 1995 —just before the World Wide Web exploded into dominance in the software world—About Face rapidly became a bestseller. While the ideas and principles in the original book remain as relevant as ever, the examples in About Face 2.0 are updated to reflect the latest advances in interaction design, as well as principles specifically addressing Web and handheld platforms.
	By Alan Cooper & Robert Reimann, Foreword by Hugh Dubberly John Wiley & Sons; ISBN: 0764526413