All posts about
Interaction design

Interaction design defines the structure and content of communication between two or more interactive “beings” to understand each other. (source: Wikipedia)

Opportunities and challenges for touch and gesture-based systems

Added on 12 June 2013 Peter Bogaards
“Touch. Sweet touch. You’ve given me too much to feel. Sweet touch. You’ve almost convinced me I’m real.”

“(…) getting the technology to work is hard, but the really hard part is getting the human-system interaction right, making it easy for people to use the systems. Here are the issues. Touch and sensing technology is becoming more and more popular, whether it is on mobile telephones and tablets, navigation systems, or even cooking appliances. These give great opportunities, and of course, great opportunities also pose great challenges. Some are technical, but more and more they are interaction and design challenges – how to ensure that the capabilities of the technology are well matched to the needs and capabilities of the people who use them.”

(Donald A. Norman & Bahar Wadia ~ Nielsen Norman Group)

Steampunking interaction design

Added on 25 April 2013 Peter Bogaards
A kind of out-of-place and out-of-time way of designing.

“Contemporary Steampunk culture owes much to the Internet and the communities of practice that have arisen online to share techniques, post tutorials, debate principles, and generally create an ecosystem that supports and celebrates improvisation, exploration, experimentation, and bricolage.”

(Joshua Tanenbaum, Audrey Desjardins, Karen Tanenbaum ~ ACM Interactions May/June 2013)

Jack of all trades, master of none: Danger for interaction design

Added on 26 February 2013 Peter Bogaards
Wondering why it’s ‘User Experience’ but Interaction Design.

“Interaction design is a young field. At least, that’s what we as interaction designers keep telling ourselves. And of course, in comparison to many other fields we are respectfully young. But I get the feeling that we use it more as an excuse to permit ourselves to have an unclear definition of who we are – and who we aren’t.”

(Jeroen van Geel ~ Core77)

The grammar of interactivity

Added on 18 February 2013 Peter Bogaards
Like all (visual) languages, digital has its own version of morphology, syntaxis, and semantics to communicate with humans. Grammar included.

“User experience design calls for us to write words on buttons all the time – but how do we know whether we’re choosing the right ones? Linguistics may provide a clue. What follows is a simple test to check whether your calls to action ‘work’ linguistically as well as a guide to consider the grammar of your experience elements.”

(Jonathan Richards a.k.a. @jonnyrichards ~ UX Booth)

Media studies, mobile augmented reality, and interaction design

Added on 7 January 2013 Peter Bogaards
Integrating, relating, and syncing multiple important fields of practice and disciples always results into something interesting.

“McLuhan’s idea is compelling, but media aesthetics is not as simple and singular as McLuhan suggests. It is not simply that technology changes and extends our perceptual systems, because we are not passive in this process. As individuals and as a whole culture, we create new technological forms and designs that define new relationships between us and our environment. There is a feedback loop in which our view of the world changes our designs, and our use of new artifacts and designs changes how we perceive the world. If we take a historical view, we can see these feedback processes at work. Media studies can then contribute to aesthetic design, which we can define as the practice of reconfiguring the way the user perceives her environment through technology.”

(Jay Bolter, Maria Engberg, and Blair MacIntyre ~ ACM Interactions Jan/Feb 2013)

When You Shouldn’t Use Fitts’s Law To Measure User Experience

Added on 5 December 2012 Peter Bogaards
Fitts’ law is a principle for UI design; not an evaluation method for UX.

“The key statement of Fitts’s Law is that the time required to move a pointing device to a target is a function of the distance to the target and its size. In layman’s terms: the closer and larger a target, the faster it is to click on that target. This is easy to understand, not too difficult to implement and it doesn’t seem to make much sense to contradict such a simple and obvious statement.”

(Anastasios Karafillis ~ Smashing Magazine)

Collecting Payment Information Within a Single Input

Added on 28 November 2012 Peter Bogaards
Micro-design for the best payment experience.

“For years the advice for mobile designers has been to avoid text input. Screens are small, fingers are imprecise, and so errors happen. But at the same time mobile devices are always with us, always on, and always connected. So instead of trying to limit input we should be encouraging it and taking steps to ensure it’s easy to provide accurately. Enter input masks.”

(Luke Wroblewski a.k.a. @LukeW)

Designing Life-Changing Solutions

Added on 27 November 2012 Peter Bogaards
Design of digital stuff changes everybody’s lives. Deal with it.

“The boundaries between design and psychology are progressively blurring. With designers increasingly facing high stakes challenges and more psychologists jumping off the academic pedestal to get their hands dirty with real people in real contexts, the two disciplines are more intertwined than ever before.”

(Giorgio Baresi a.k.a. @giorgiobaresi ~ design mind Frog Design) ~ courtesy of fabiosergio

Bill Moggridge 1943-2012

Added on 10 September 2012 Peter Bogaards
Paying tribute to one of our founding fathers.

“A tribute to esteemed museum director Bill Moggridge, who passed away on September 8, 2012 following a battle with cancer. Hear about his pioneering work and influence in the field of design from Tim Brown and David Kelley of IDEO, Bernie Roth of Stanford University and Caroline Baumann and Cara McCarty of Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum.”

(Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum)

Interaction with Big Data Analytics

Added on 1 June 2012 Peter Bogaards
Big data needs big design for big experiences.

“Here we have described big data analytics as an emerging type of knowledge work, with plenty of opportunities for study and productivity improvements. However, even for those who are not interested in this form of knowledge work, big data analytics cannot be ignored: It’s an important new avenue to learn about how people interact with computing.”

(Danyel Fisher, Rob DeLine, Mary Czerwinski, Steven Drucker ~ ACM Interactions)

Interaction as Performance

Added on 1 June 2012 Peter Bogaards
Theatre, method acting and stage performance are great metaphors, inspirations and analogies for digital product experiences.

“Our overall goal is to lay the foundations for a ‘dramaturgy of performance’ by establishing a framework of concepts—a language, if you like—to help express the different ways in which computers can be embedded into performative experiences. We intend this framework to guide practitioners and researchers who are entering the field of artistic, performance, and cultural applications of computing. However, we also aim to stimulate wider thinking in HCI in general around the changing nature of the extended user experience and the new challenges this raises.”

(Steve Benford and Gabriella Giannachi ~ ACM Interactions)

Is your organization design ready?

Added on 26 March 2012 Peter Bogaards
The idea remains: UX is an organizational challenge, not a design one.

“Let’s presume for the moment that interaction design can be perfected and delivered to your organization in a tidy, shiny bundle of brilliance. Have you now got a magic talisman that will protect you from competition and summon market share? Of course not. Design is just the beginning.”

(Chris Noessel a.k.a. @chrisnoessel ~ Cooper Journal) ~ courtesy of willemijnprins

My Interaction12 Recap: As long as it’s gotta be

Added on 15 February 2012 Peter Bogaards
IxDA 2012 as a thriven, inspiring and interesting event.

“The Interaction conference platform is the most visible and energetic of all the organization’s endeavors thus far, even though just a tiny percentage of IxDA members are able to attend in person. This year, even as IxD12 attendance grew to 750 people, that percentage diminishes because the organization now counts somewhere around 35,000 members in its digital forums, with over 100 local groups operating in cities around the globe. Only about 40% of the attendees came from North America this year, with over 32 countries represented.”

(Elisabeth Bacon a.k.a. @ebacon ~ Devise)

State of Interaction Design: Diverging

Added on 24 January 2012 Peter Bogaards
Like any other practice, through time professionals gravitate towards different epicentres of expertise.

“Interaction Design is reaching a critical point in its history. We have spent the better part of the last half century converging. We have built our entire identity by bringing in other disciplines and practices into our fold. We are often decried as ‘land grabbers’, but I say it is more about shoring up our knowledge base and practice so that we can be ready for the ever-increasing complexity of the tasks set before us through our acknowledged focus on human behavior as it relates broadly to the interaction of systems.”

(David Malouf a.k.a. @daveixd ~ Core77)

Defining an Interaction Model: The Cornerstone of Application Design

Added on 23 January 2012 Peter Bogaards
Or, on the value of working with models. Of any kind.

“An interaction model is a design model that binds an application together in a way that supports the conceptual models of its target users. It is the glue that holds an application together. It defines how all of the objects and actions that are part of an application interrelate, in ways that mirror and support real-life user interactions. It ensures that users always stay oriented and understand how to move from place to place to find information or perform tasks. It provides a common vision for an application. It enables designers, developers, and stakeholders to understand and explain how users move from objects to actions within a system. It is like a cypher or secret decoder ring: Once you understand the interaction model, once you see the pattern, everything makes sense. Defining the right interaction model is a foundational requirement for any digital system and contributes to a cohesive, overall UX architecture.”

(Jim Nieters ~ UXmatters)

Affective Computing, Affective Interaction and Technology as Experience

Added on 13 January 2012 Peter Bogaards
Technology moving into the fibers of our emotions.

“As Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Interaction Design moved from designing and evaluating work-oriented applications towards dealing with leisure-oriented applications, such as games, social computing, art, and tools for creativity, we have had to consider e.g. what constitutes an experience, how to deal with users’ emotions, and understanding aesthetic practices and experiences. Here I will provide a short account of why in particular emotion became one such important strand of work in our field.”

(Kristina Höök a.k.a. @ProfessorHook ~ Interaction-Design.org)