Designing for Interaction - Creating Smart Applications and Clever Devices

The future will be what the future has always been: hopeful, scary, unknown, disorienting. Only more so.

In designing services, interaction designers have to figure out how the brand translates in each of the aspects of the service design: environments, objects, processes, and people. This translation is particularly challenging when designing processes, since these are often intangible.

In adaptive design, designers must enable the experience/object to "learn," and users to be able to "teach" the experience/object. So it's a two-way interaction, in which the user wants to adapt the product, to make it useful to him or her. Therefore, the designers must concentrate on enabling this adaptation in order to achieve a useful experience, rather than attempting to direct the experience toward usefulness themselves. Designers shouldn't aim to control, but to enable.

As cognitive psychologist Don Norman pointed out in his book Emotional Design, beautiful products work better. Humans are more forgiving of mistakes in things that are more aesthetically pleasing. Objects that are agreeable to the eye or that fit well in the hand engender good feelings in their users, as do services in pleasing environments.

Responsiveness makes people feel appreciated and understood.

Dutch cultural anthropologist Geert Hofstede, in his book Software of the Mind, identified five major dimensions that can be used to help understand different cultures and adjust designs accordingly:
Power distance. To what extent will members of a culture accept inequities in power among members of that culture?
Individualism versus collectivism. Do members of a culture have loose ties to their families and others, or are they members of strong groups (especially families)?
Masculinity versus femininity. How strong are the gender roles in a culture? In strong masculine cultures, traditional distinctions between the sexes are maintained.
Uncertainty avoidance. How tolerant is a culture of ambiguity and uncertainty?
Long-term versus short-term orientation. How much does a culture value the future over the past and present?

If a million users each waste a minute a day dealing with complexity that an engineer could have eliminated in a week by making the software a little more complex, you are penalizing the user to make the engineer's job easier.

Systems design is a very analytical way of approaching design problems; it uses an established arrangement of components to create design solutions. Whereas in user-centered design, the user is at the center of the design process, here a systema set of entities that act upon each otheris. A system isn't necessarily a computer, although it can be. Systems can also consist of people, devices, machines, and objects. Systems can range from the simple (the heating system in your house) to the enormously complex (whole governments).

In poem after poem, the late barfly poet extraordinaire Charles Bukowski noted that it wasn't the big things that drove people mad, it was the small stuff: little things not going well, small irritants that over time made you crazythe leaking faucet, the stains that won't come out of clothes, the mobile phone that won't dial. Interaction designers try to ameliorate some of that annoyance, making sure that the products and services people deal with make sense, are usable and useful, and are even engaging and fun. Some of what good interaction designers do is make the world better by removing those little irritants in life, some of which we don't know exist until they are gone.

But interaction design isn't about interaction with computers (that's the discipline of human-computer interaction) or interaction with machines (that's industrial design). It's about making connections between people through these products, not connecting to the product itself.