IA Summit presentation by Stephen Anderson – “I’ve often believed that the best designers don’t get their ideas and inspiration from the place they work. As a designer that works in the social web space, I do look at a large number of new sites that come through the pipeline for inspiration. However, I also am a big advocate of experimenting with things that are seemingly unrelated and trying to connect those experiences to my work on the web.” (kev/null)

“One of the most common interaction patterns one can find on forms is the date input group. They appear in all shapes and sizes in various applications and sign up forms on websites. Certain forms of appearance seem to be more popular in certain geographical areas than other. But other than that it is hard to find any pattern or rationale why one website has chosen for model X while the other has chosen model Y. The suspicion would rise that the date input method is often dictated by the way the backend would ‘like’ it. This is a situation which neither we, as interaction designers and consultants, nor the end user should settle for.” (Cornelis Govert Adriaan Kolbach – cornae.org)

“The talk I gave last fall at the Institute of Design’s 2007 Design Research conference is now available as a video! It’s probably one of the funniest (and most fun) talks I’ve ever given. Enjoy!” (Dan Saffer – Adaptive Path)

“Ajax and Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) have revolutionized the way users interact with Web sites. However, documenting the design of any page that uses Ajax is a challenge, because the page – and, more importantly, components on the page – can have different states, depending on how users interact with the page’s components.” (Richard F. Cecil – UXmatters)

“Our exciting line-up includes industry legends as well as up and coming stars for a well-rounded, engaging two days of inspiration and learning.” – (Interaction Design Association)

“The solution is elegantly simple in concept, if arduously difficult in implementation.” (Alan Cooper – Cooper Journal of Design)

“I wondered for a long time whether I was right to suspect that using gestural input like on my trackpad really would appeal to most people, or whether it just reflected an eccentricity of mine.” (Jonathan Korman – Cooper Journal of Design)

“Designing Interactions gives access to a very detailed and adept summarized history of commercial interaction design. It’s an invaluable resource to anyone who wants to know what happened to get us to this point, especially with the computer interfaces. But, again, it does beg the question to be answered, ‘Why did these few people have such an effect, something that more designers producing more varying designs could have had?’” (Clifton Evans – Boxes and Arrows)

“Now that the Wii and iPhone have introduced more physical interactions to the public at large, it’s time to step up and start making an effort to define and document a common set of movements and motions that could be used for initiating actions across a variety of platforms.” (Dan Saffer – Adaptive Path)

“It’s also important to note that Interaction Design is distinct from the other design disciplines. It’s not Information Architecture, Industrial Design or even User Experience Design. It also isn’t user interface design. Interaction design is not about form or even structure, but is more ephemeral – about why and when rather than about what and how.” (David Malouf – Boxes and Arrows)

“Interaction design is a blended endeavor of process, methodology, and attitude. Discussions of process and methodology are pervasive in the interaction design milieu and often revolve around a perceived tension between process and methodology and the role of design within this discipline. To be clear, process is the overarching design framework—for example, an iterative, or spiral, process or a sequential, or waterfall, process. Conversely, a methodology is a prescribed design approach such as user-centered design or genius design.” (Kevin Silver – UXmatters)

“With great excitement, the IxDA Board of Directors announces the availability of the beta version of a new IxDA community experience. Through the efforts of IxDA volunteers, and spearheaded by community member Jeff Howard, we are pleased to launch the beta version. We believe this effort is the start of creating a new kind of professional organization. The new site will allow a significantly better experience for all of us in the community, including tagging of content, customized RSS feeds, browsing by topics and the ability to share information about you with the community.” (Interaction Design Association) – courtesy of joannesvandermeulen

“Interaction design is a tool for ‘Knowing what the user wants.’ Armed with that knowledge, you can create better, more successful, bit-empowered products, and you can sell them for more money.” (Alan Cooper)

“Interaction design is a broad term inflected in different ways in different communities. To us, interaction design comprises all efforts to understand human engagement with digital technology and all efforts to use that knowledge to design more useful and pleasing artifacts. Within this arena, the main audiences for this book are those who conduct work in the fields of human–computer interaction, computer–supported collaborative work, computer–supported collaborative learning, digital design, cognitive ergonomics, informatics, information systems, and human factors.” (Victor Kaptelinin and Bonnie Nardi – First Monday 12.4)

“It’s been a little less than a week since my IA Summit presentation. To my great surprise, it went really well. In the next day or so I will be posting a summary of my experiences preparing and discussing my topic, which was, in a word, style. Many people came to me after my presentation asking me not only to post the slides themselves, but also to post the reading list since I did discuss a lot of books and sites that deeply influenced my thinking. So here’s all the stuff: (…)” (Christopher Fahey – graphpaper.com)

“It is the primary goal of this text to better define Interaction Design: to provide a definition that encompasses the intellectual facets of the field, the conceptual underpinnings of Interaction Design as a legitimate human-centered profession, and the particular methods used by practitioners in their day to day experiences” (Jon Kolko et al.)

“My SXSW 2007 presentation. People seemed to like it. Sam Felder’s transcription of the talk. Podcast supposedly coming from SXSW eventually.” (Dan Saffer – odannyboy)

“The job of interaction designers is to provide pleasure and power to people through the design of products, services, tools, and processes that satisfy their goals. With the discipline of interaction design still in its infancy, some people believe the medium in which we work is pixels. But this is manifestly untrue.” (David Fore – Cooper Newsletter)

“As arbitrators of checkout, registration, and data entry, forms are often the linchpins of successful Web applications. But successful Web applications tend to grow—both in terms of capability and complexity. And this increasing complexity is often passed on to and absorbed by a Web application’s forms. In addition to needing more input fields, labels, and Help text, forms with a growing number of options may also require selection-dependent inputs.” (Luke Wroblewski – UXmatters)

“There are many ways to document an interaction design and the level of details needed is dependent on what your documenting and for what purpose. There has also been a lot of discussions on what the best tool for creating interaction designs and/or prototypes is (…). The tool you choose is of course also dependent on what you are documenting and for what purpose. It is also much of a personal taste what tool one prefers to work with.” (interakt.nu) – courtesy of Anders Björk