What is Advanced Interaction Design Anyway?
by DanAfter the last two UX Intensive workshops, I have had people come up to me afterwards and say, “I really liked the day and found it really interesting and useful, but it wasn’t interaction design.” Which leaves me puzzled: it might not be about interaction design per se, but it has everything to do with being an interaction designer.
I heard Kim Goodwin speak at Business to Buttons (pdf) two weeks ago and she said something like, “Doing the design is the easy part. It’s only half the job.” My workshop, which I’m doing again in Vancouver in November, is a lot about the other half of the job, the part that doesn’t get talked about much. Stuff like wireframing and personas have been extensively discussed and written about elsewhere. Designers who have been doing interaction design for years know that stuff backwards and forwards; they don’t need me to talk about it at a workshop that is geared towards experienced practitioners.
I suppose I could talk about advanced methods in mobile, web, consumer electronics, and software, but if you don’t work in one of those mediums, you will likely be bored to tears. Instead, I focus on things like turning research into concepts, decision-making, strategies for fixing broken products, and communicating design within an organization. Technically, a lot of these things might not be “interaction design” but they are definitely part of the work of interaction designers.
When I made this workshop, I based many of my topics off a thread from the IxDA mailing list. In the spirit of feedback and constant iteration, what other topics would you like to see covered in an advanced interaction design day?
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June 28th, 2007 at 9:51 am
I’d like to see a course on designing human to human interactions in service encounters. That’s the really advanced stuff.
June 28th, 2007 at 2:37 pm
i just attended the amsterdam workshop and, too, was puzzled (at least till lunchbreak) about the appoach to the workshop. But the real eye-opener came the day after. Chiara opened her workshop with Jesses Diagram of the levels of user experience. Interaction Design is on the same level as IA, and not something more concrete like Interface Design or Visual Design (and I got the impression that it was the latter two aspects, at least some people expected). So, just a thought: why not use the Elements Diagram on one of the first slides to define, what is meant by Interaction Design.
What you described in the Workshop - and what we tried in the excersises, where different methods that help achieve better results when the more concrete design work is due. That, at least, is what I got as (definitely valuable) insights.
June 28th, 2007 at 4:19 pm
Hey Dan. This isn’t an answer to your question, but a comment on my observation of similar things. I’ve been teaching information architecture for what feels like a long time (5 years I think). I’ve spent time thinking about participants expectations/reactions and have observed our field for a while.
This is going to sound a bit condescending, and I don’t mean it like that. But I’ve learned that people don’t (usually) go to workshops to learn how to think. They go to workshops to get practical skills and answers - things they can walk out and use. So I’d expect many are hoping for an advanced version of how to design good interfaces.
This balance is very tricky. I try to manage it (and it mostly works) by layering my teaching. At the bottom layer I teach mechanics - how to do user research, how to card sort. The next layer is case studies and stories that illustrate the variations and complexity. The third layer is my philosophical approach to design which is all about thinking, teamwork and that there aren’t being black & white answers. And I always provide lots of resources for people to follow up.
And in your workshop, I like everything except the ‘communicating’ part. I think that is well covered elsewhere.