1.3. Design and Interaction

The great industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss called design “the measure of man.” By this, he meant that the design of things is an excellent way to understand and analyze the activities of human beings. Defining the word design is a task better left to others, so I’ll leave my contribution at this: interaction design is the creation of tools for how we do specific things. The more specific the thing, the more finely the tool can be honed for it, and the more specific the interaction design can be. Interaction is sometimes confused with “doing something with a tool,” and although that’s important, it’s a little less specific than “how we do things with a tool.” Thinking about tools in terms of how, rather than just what, when, or why, isolates those things about the interaction that define the experience of doing that task. A lot depends on the task as well. A singular task with a singular action does not foster much dissonance; therefore, it can bear a lot more dissonance before it becomes meaningless. A task of multiple actions creates much greater dissonance and can lose meaningfulness much more quickly.

The design of an interaction is a complex process that involves a lot of modeling of how a system will work, how a user will approach the goal she’s trying to accomplish, and how the interface needs to be configured to allow for all of these different operations. All of these taken together create the context of the interaction that you’re making. The context is very important to what choices you should make for the design of an interaction. You might want to make the interaction very cut and dry so that everything that the user expects is given to her as quickly as possible and in an unambiguous manner. Most business applications or very task-based applications function this way; users know what they can do in unambiguous terms, and the interaction doesn’t deviate much from that initial information. There is a real pleasure in knowing what to expect and getting it so that you can make the interaction—and by extension the application or object—attractive. Or, you might want to make something much more playful, where the reward is in discovering the interaction and seeing it change throughout the use of it. Either way, a good understanding of the context of the user will help you create a better system and a better experience.