Adaptive Path Blog

The theme of UX Week’s Day Four is Interaction Design in the Field. Just to give you a taste of what it will be like, I had a conversation with one of the speakers, Bill DeRouchey, recently. An excerpt:

Bill: Interaction designers, of course, should be trying to deconstruct everything around them to better train themselves as interaction designers. And the fun thing about that is we’re completely surrounded by examples, it’s all the devices in our daily lives. It’s the cell phones, microwaves, ATM machines, computers, printers, and so on. We’re surrounded by buttons and icons and little blinky lights that can give us examples of how people think about devices and interaction design because there’s one thing that’s definitely true, people don’t approach the product from a void. They’re taking the learnings that they’ve experienced with other products and they apply them to a new product: that’s why you tend to see the same icons over and over that mean the same thing; they have a stock meaning within the language of interaction design. An arrow tilted on its side and pointing to the right means play because it always means play, and because people know it means play when they approach a new device and they see that, they think, “That’s play.” It’s such a simple thing, but it comes down to the core of a visual language that we all share, and I think it’s important to try to deconstruct that language so we know how people are approaching a new product, a new device. So we can make it intuitive and they can tap into what they already know.

Read the full interview and I’ll see you at UX Week!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 1st, 2007 at 12:22 pm and is filed under Creativity, Interaction Design, People you should know about, Plugs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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