What is interactive design?

Answer 1

What is interactive design? Interaction Design(IxD or IaD) is the discipline of defining and creating the behavior of technical, biological, environmental and organizational systems. Examples of these systems are http://www.answers.com/topic/computer-software, http://www.answers.com/topic/product-20, http://www.answers.com/topic/mobile-device, http://www.answers.com/topic/runtime, http://www.answers.com/topic/service-disambiguation, http://www.answers.com/topic/wearable-computer, and even organizations themselves. Interaction design defines the behavior (the "interaction") of an artifact or system in response to its users over time. Interaction designers are typically informed by user research, http://www.answers.com/topic/design with an emphasis on behavior as well as form, and evaluate design in terms of http://www.answers.com/topic/usability and emotional factors. As products and experiences become more complicated or gain new capabilities, designers face new challenges in helping users use them effectively. Often, new technologies are complex to their intended users. Interaction design aims to minimize the learning curve and increase the accuracy and efficiency of task completion, without diminishing the value of a product's useful functionality. The objective is to lead to less frustration, higher productivity, and higher satisfaction for users. Interaction design attempts to improve the usability and experience of the object or system, by first researching and understanding certain users' needs and then designing to meet and exceed these needs. Interaction Design is often associated with the design of system interfaces in a variety of media (see also: http://www.answers.com/topic/user-interface-design, http://www.answers.com/topic/experience-design) but concentrates on the aspects of the interface that define and present its behavior over time, with a focus on developing the system to respond to the user's experience and not the other way around. The system interface can be thought of as the artifact (whether visual or other sensory) that represents an offering's designed interactions. http://www.answers.com/topic/ivr (http://www.answers.com/topic/voice-user-interface) is an example of interaction design without graphical user interface as a media. http://www.answers.com/topic/interactivity, however, is not limited to technological systems. People have been interacting with each other as long as humans have been a species. Therefore, interaction design can be applied to the development of all solutions (or offerings), such as services and events. Those who design these offerings have, typically, performed interaction design inherently without naming it as such. The term interaction design was first proposed by http://www.answers.com/topic/bill-moggridge and Bill Verplank in the late http://www.answers.com/topic/eighty. To Verplank, it was an adaptation of the computer science term user interface design to the industrial design profession [1]. To Moggridge, it was an improvement over soft-face, which he had coined in 1984 to refer to the application of industrial design to products containing software (Moggridge 2006). In 1989, Gillian Crampton-Smith established an interaction design MA at the Royal College of Art in London (originally entitled "computer-related design" and now known as "design interactions"). In 2001, she helped found the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, a small institute in Northern Italy dedicated solely to interaction design. Today, interaction design is taught in many schools worldwide. There is a general process that most interaction designers follow, the point of which is to create a solution (not thesolution) to a known problem. A key element in this process is the idea of iteration, where the aim is to build quick prototypes and test them with the users to make sure the proposed solution is satisfactory. Here, briefly, are the major steps in most interaction designers' process: Using http://www.answers.com/topic/design-research techniques (http://www.answers.com/topic/participant-observation, http://www.answers.com/topic/interview, and activities) designers investigate users and their environment in order to learn more about them and thus be better able to design for them. Drawing on a combination of user research, technological possibilities, and business opportunities, designers create concepts for new software, products, services, or systems. This process may involve multiple rounds of brainstorming, discussion, and refinement. Designers will first create personas or user profiles that are reflective of their targeted user group. From these personae, and the patterns of behavior observed in the research, designers create http://www.answers.com/topic/scenario-computing (or http://www.answers.com/topic/user-story) or http://www.answers.com/topic/storyboard, which imagine a future work flow the users will go through using the product or service. The features and functionality of a product or service are often outlined in a document known as a wireframe ("schematics" is an alternate term). Wireframes are a page-by-page or screen-by-screen detail of the system, which include notes ("annotations") as to how the system will operate. Flow Diagrams outline the logic and steps of the system or an individual feature. Interaction designers use a variety of prototyping techniques to test aspects of design ideas. These can be roughly divided into three classes: those that test the role of an artifact, those that test its look and feel and those that test its implementation. Sometimes, these are called experience prototypes to emphasize their interactive nature. Prototypes can be physical or digital, high- or low-fidelity. Interaction designers need to be involved during the development of the product or service to ensure that what was designed is implemented correctly. Often, changes need to be made during the building process, and interaction designers should be involved with any of the on-the-fly modifications to the design. Once the system is built, often another round of testing, for both usability and errors ("bug catching") is performed. Ideally, the designer will be involved here as well, to make any modifications to the system that are required. Certain basic principles of http://www.answers.com/topic/cognitive-psychology provide grounding for interaction design. These include concepts such as http://www.answers.com/topic/mental-model, mapping, metaphors, and http://www.answers.com/topic/affordance. Many of these were laid out in the influential book donald-norman. Interaction designers work in many areas, including software interfaces, (business) information systems, internet, physical products, environments, services, and systems which may combine many of these. Each area requires its own skills and approaches, but there are aspects of interaction design common to all. Interaction designers often work in interdisciplinary teams as their work requires expertise in many different domains, including graphic design, programming, psychology, user testing, product design, etc (see below for more related disciplines). Thus, they need to understand enough of these fields to work effectively with specialists. Social interaction design (SxD) is emerging due to the fact that many of our computing devices have become networked and have begun to integrate communication capabilities. Phones, digital assistants and the myriad of connected devices from computers to games facilitate talk and http://www.answers.com/topic/social-interaction. Social interaction design accounts for interactions among users as well as between users and their devices. The dynamics of http://www.answers.com/topic/interpersonal-communication, speech and writing, the pragmatics of talk and interaction--these now become critical factors in the use of social technologies. And they are factors described less by an approach steeped in the rational choice approach taken by cognitive science than that by http://www.answers.com/topic/sociology, http://www.answers.com/topic/psychology, and http://www.answers.com/topic/anthropology-12. == ==