Good Interaction Design Often Not Up To Interaction Designers
In the past the average site or application was designed by technically minded people. They build it and as the application takes shapes the user interface gets added. Add a feature, add a button. I suppose that is still how things go in some projects today. Very little attention was given to Interaction Design. Now that Interaction Design is becoming more of a necessity than before, things are changing. We are seeing more and more applications that has clearly been developed with and Interaction Designer on board or someone in the team with an eye for Interaction. However, we aren’t quite there yet.
Good interaction design is much more than what you see in front of you when you use an application. Good interaction design is also the ability of an application to guess or anticipate what you want to do, aiding you in the task at hand. For instance, the ability of windows to remember its previous location or your word processor automatically selecting your most used font. You see, many of these things might be suggested by an Interaction Designer but in the end it is up to the programmer to implement these improvements and because they are the last people to deal with a project, many of the innovative solutions you come up with as an interaction designer is often left out because of extra coding.
Similiar Posts
4 Responses to “Good Interaction Design Often Not Up To Interaction Designers”
Leave a Reply
About Me
-
I am currently doing my Masters in Interface Design at the University of Applied Sciences in Potsdam, Germany. Dutchman living in Berlin, born in South Africa. - Find out more here
Free Downloads
Subscribe
-
Categories
- Browsers (16)
- Design Guidelines (18)
- Google (9)
- Interaction (42)
- Mobiles (10)
- OS (6)
- research (1)
- review (3)
- Social (3)
- Tips (1)
- Uncategorized (20)
- Usability (47)
- Web 2.0 (16)
Archives
Dennis Koks Says:
This also depends on the internal structure of a company. Companies that work withing teams who contain a person of every disapline will have this problem way less. If you’re in a company with a seperate programming department and a seperate interaction design department the chance is much bigger that these problems would occur.
It’s also a matter of how serious people take the jobs of his/here colleagues, and the visions they have uppon the whole process.
Joel Laumans Says:
I understand where you are going with this, but I think its not really “up to the programmer to implement these improvements”
…it is his job!
And if he can’t/won’t they should hire a different programmer.
I think that if a company is willing to pay for an interaction designer, they are willing to listen to him.
Scott L Says:
I think what you are talking about is actually the complete interaction part itself, the programmers are there to code based upon the information they are given from interaction designers,and once coded they are by no means the last people to deal with the project in any sense.
The user testing and initial feedback from what the programmers then have done can be evaluated by the interaction designers, so that they can asses if this is to the users requirements
A final point “Good Interaction Design is always up to Interaction designers” thats the purpose, yes there may well be company politics etc that could give poor communication, but the goal as an interaction designer always should be to be able to communicate the design to the programmers so they can develop the correct system.
Peter Says:
Thanks for the comment, Scott.