Whenever you sit in front of your computer, clicking the buttons on the screen of your monitor, or when you poke your fingers on the touch screen of your tablet, edit text on your laptop, turn off annoying TV commercials with your remote control, you interact with an intelligent machine that has to understand you and react in a way that pleases you. Such interaction is so familiar and natural that it does not even occur to us that, firstly, it is an international standard, secondly, designing the interaction is not a simple thing and thirdly, designing an interactive interface of a software product requires a certain skill of the developer.
Why do we value some products we use and are reluctant to use those that do not deliver the expected satisfaction. We recognize the usefulness of a product only if its features meet our needs. Moreover, here we are referring not only to obvious needs, but also to hidden needs that we are not aware of. For example, products Apple products such as the iPad and iPhone. They not only have a simple and clear interface, but also allow us to meet the hidden needs of users, making their lives much more comfortable.
What can lead to is an underestimation of interaction design. For example, your Smart panel has such a “convoluted interface” that you don’t use half of the features it has, and the control panel resembles an airplane control panel. Your cell phone defaults to intuitive auto-swapping when you compose text messages, and as a result, you can’t dial a message or turn off this “bear service.” Sometimes it takes a very long time to find the “Keypad” button to dial a number on your smartphone. It is important to note that in all cases there is no prompt, call to action or offer of help.
Even in operating systems from the software giant Microsoft there are blunders in the design of interaction. In Windows XP, fatal errors would cause the so called “blue window of death” where you could see the same text, regardless of the very different reasons for the failure. Unfortunately, such problems are still quite common. Surprisingly, children can easily cope with these problems. They are the ones who instantly master the full interaction with the coolest computer games.
Successful design of digital interactive products, which include most operating systems, programs and mobile applications, is impossible without taking into account the complex behavior that these products can suddenly demonstrate. Traditional design has consistently missed this aspect, forgetting about it or leaving the finalization of the product to the final stage. To avoid such a situation, a new independent discipline is created, which should focus solely on the design of the behavior of a software product in interaction with the consumer.
Back in the 1980s, programmers, engineers and designers from several Silicon Valley companies and some European companies began to work on the interaction of people with computers. Bill Moggridge put forward the idea of creating a design discipline – “soft-face” – and later he called it “interactive design”.
At the beginning of this century, Harvard Business School and Stanford University included interaction design for the first time in their curricula for training software product designers in the training of future technologists and managers. Henceforth, graduates were instructed to always include these issues in business plans and work schedules. And in 2005 the Interaction Design Association – IxDA – was established in the USA. And since then an independent profession – interaction design – has emerged among designers.
Of course, focusing on interaction, we must not diminish the importance of other factors of creating a software product. We mean the links with such fields as interface design, information architecture, usability engineering, industrial design, ergonomics. A program product is a multi-purpose, multi-task project that requires coordinated work of specialists in all fields. Lately there have appeared specialists in the field of interaction design.
And a software product can only be successful, Larry Keeley believes, if it has three qualities: – “desirability, viability, and feasibility.”