Adaptive Path Blog

I was having a conversation yesterday and mentioned that I occasionally designed mobile phones. The woman I was talking to then proceeded to tell me about the big problem with her phone, that sometimes when she talked, her face hit the buttons and caused the phone to start dialing or beeping and generally disrupting the call. I started to say, “Well, that’s really an industrial design problem…” but caught myself. Maybe it was unavoidable from an ID standpoint. Perhaps they didn’t have the manufacturing budget for better buttons, for instance. Maybe there was something that could be done from the interaction design side, like, say, making it difficult for the pressed keys to do much while a call is in progress.

Each discipline can only go so far with the constraints they work under, and we have to watch each other’s backs and cover for the flaws of each other. Users don’t care whose fault it is that a product works poorly, only that it works poorly. All the disciplines need work together to figure out solutions to product flaws, with visual, interaction, and industrial design blending their strengths together. The visual design should make the interaction design look good, which in turn makes the industrial design look good, which makes the visual design look good. (Mix up the order as you will.) Focusing on the connective tissue between disciplines makes products holistic.

This is the essence of experience design.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 20th, 2008 at 3:36 pm and is filed under Experience Design, Idealism (Uncensored), Product Design, The Big Picture. 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.