Reading Thoughts – 1/27

Interaction Design History in a Teeny Tiny Nutshell
Marc Rettig

This presentation shares a quick timeline of principles of modern day computing that have evolved over time. The first principle operate the machine treated users as components in the production system and cared only about the usefulness of the machine. With the invention of the mouse by Doug Englebart in 1954 and Sketchpad by Ivan Sutherlath in 1963, the computing paradigm shifted toward the principle of use the software. This principle treated computers as a platform for a function and the users as important manipulators of content. The next shift was toward the principle of perform a task, which focused on the users’ pleasure in using a computer and smart software design. The most current principles are experience and connect, where we see the importance of interaction design at the forefront of our computing. Finally, the future of computing is moving toward the principle of dynamically enabled, where content will be constantly streaming and updating to allow more relevant real-time experiences.

This presentation was engaging and interesting, mostly because it offered a perspective on interaction design that differed from the other readings for this week. The author, or I guess, presenter, was able to clearly explain how our users’, engineers’, and designers’ roles have changed computer innovation in the last 50 years as well as how their roles have been changed because of these innovations. Although it has only been about 7 years since this presentation was first shared, it seems as though we have already entered what Rettig considers the future. We are seeing more and more dynamic content in such forms as news feeds and Twitter, and I think content and content management will continue to become more dynamic.


Introduction to Designing Interactions by Bill Moggridge
Gillian Crampton Smith

“If I were to sum up interaction design in a sentence, I would say that it’s about shaping our everyday life through digital artifacts–for work, for play, and for entertainment.” This paper starts by explaining how pervasive computer technology is and how designers should make it fit “gracefully” into our everyday lives (1). David Liddle defines three stages of technology use. Users in the enthusiast stage are excited about the nuts and bolts of the technology and do not care about the difficulty or ease of use of a product. Users in the professional stage use technology purchased by others who do not care about difficulty. Essentially, they are subject to the buying powers of their superiors and have no say in the usability. Users in the consumer stage are interested in what the technology can do for them. Because computers are so ubiquitous, users are concerned with what technological objects mean personally and to other people (symbolically).

A few design principles are also mentioned in the paper:

• Reassuring feedback: let users know what they’ve done when they’ve done it.
• Navigability: let users know where they are in the system.
• Consistency: a certain command in one part of the system should have the same effect in another part.
• Intuitive interaction: minimize the burden of conscious thought needed to operate the system.

These all seem to be relevant principles to add to my design toolkit and are further enforced by the below readings. It was interesting to think of ‘stages of technology’, as Liddle calls them, because the stages do determine the motivation of the user types contained within them. Perhaps it is important for interaction designers to keep all of these stages in mind when designing in order to create a seamless, meaningful experience for all.

“What Is Interaction Design?” from Interaction Design: Beyond Human Computer Interaction
Sharp, Rogers, Preece

The main focus of this paper is to introduce readers to the basic history, functions, and principles of Interaction Design. It defines interaction design as “developing interactive products that are easy, effective, and enjoyable to use–from the users’ perspective,” (2). The authors argue that interface design was born with “the advent of monitors and personal workstations in the late ’70s and early ’80s,” (7). Psychologists, linguists, graphic designers, film makers, etc., were brought in to help software engineers understand how humans behave and interact with the systems they were building.

The main considerations that interaction designers should address when beginning a project are Who is going to use the product?, For what are they going to use it?, and What activities are they doing when interacting with the product? In contrast with software engineers, interaction designers are focused on the human aspects of the design, where as the engineers are focused on efficient software solutions.

Interface designers employ a “user-centered approach to design” (12) and break down projects using different guidelines:

• usability goals: to make a product effective, efficient, and learnable in order to communicate the creator’s intentions.
• user experience goals: to make a product more pleasurable, or to invoke a certain experience for the user.
• design principles: “the do’s and don’t of interaction design” (21), or how to make your product more usable
• heuristics: drawing on past experiences to employing design principles in practice

While this text was a little dry, it did contain a lot of useful terminology and techniques to employ as an interaction designer. I specifically took to the list of User Experience Goals because, while I think Usability Goals are extremely important, the User Experience is often overlooked by designers. Just because a program is useful and easy to navigate does not necessarily mean that a user will enjoy using or navigating through the program. There is a thin line between adding a feature or adding a gimmick to a design, yet it is important to think about the enjoyment that could be experienced by a user and could bring them back again and again to your program. I also liked the analogies the texts makes to explain the role of an interaction designer versus and software engineer. I think it is important for both teams to understand the roles and expertise of each other, but also to see that we are approaching a similar problem in very different ways.

From Computing Machinery to Interaction Design
Terry Winograd

The main focus on this paper is the predicted trajectory of technology in the next 50 years. It begins by distinguishing three trends that were already in motion when the paper was published in 1997:

• Computation to Communication: “People are […] highly motivated to interact with [other people] in whatever media are available,” (2) says Winograd, and thus there has been a shift from using computers as a tool for dense, sophisticated computation to using computers as a tool for connecting people to one another.
• Machinery to Habitat: Sherry Turkle writes in Life on the Screen, “Real life is just one more window.” Cyberspace has become a space users occupy and act in; it is as much a real habitat as our office spaces and homes (4).
• Aliens to Agents: The field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has shifted in the “foundations on which the people in the filed conceived of intelligence,” (6). Engineers and computer scientists are rethinking the mental maps and models that they are building into computers to look less like human intelligence models and more like machines. An interesting article on modern AI can be read in the January 2011 issue of Wired Magazine.

The field of Interaction Design is developing to fill in the gaps left between the engineers/computer scientists building computer machines and systems and the graphic designers who make those systems more visually appealing. Because “computers have created a new medium — one that is both active and virtual,” Interaction Designers are needed to “develop principles and practices that are unique to the computer’s scope and fluidity of interactivity,” (9). These designers will be knowledgeable in the fields of engineering, computer science, graphic design, psychology, and linguistics, and will meld all of these fields together in order to design intuitive, usable, and meaningful interactions.

As someone who studied Psychology and Linguistics as an undergraduate, this text solidified why it is that I want to study interaction design. As said above, a recent article in Wired Magazine covered the current state of AI, and explained that computers cannot and should not be programmed to think like humans think. We are only touching the tip of the iceberg when it comes to understanding how human cognition works, so it is good to learn that computer scientists are moving away from trying to replicate humans in favor of machine structure to mimic human cognition.

Tags: interactivity, reading, thoughts