This post is on Interaction Design. Or more exact: Web Situated Interaction Design.

Why this distinction? Well for the time that I have been involved in the area of Interaction Design (which is about 4 years now) I have come know at least one thing for sure. There is still a lot of uncertainty about what Interaction Design really is.

During my Interaction Design study for instance at the Higher School of the Arts in Utrecht there have been lots of discussions about what you would be doing or would have to know if you were an Interaction Designer.

Almost everybody had a different opinion. Even the teachers told time and time again that ‘Interaction Design is really broad’. So you couldn’t really say what Interaction Design was. Everybody would find their own way in it.
As for most of my co-students, well it varied from an Interaction Designer being pretty much everything in the digital field (programmer, designer, developer, project leader) to the traditional arts (theater, painting, etc).

I always objected to that approach towards Interaction Design “it’s really broad so you can become pretty much anything”. In the beginning I didn’t really know why, but something just didn’t feel right. How can a study be “pretty much anything”? And especially a study like Interaction Design about which in articles on the web and more and more books there seemed to be very a specific description.

I figured it probably had something to do with the fact that school wasn’t the “real world”. The world were real world products had to be designed and build. Were you had to make decisions. So if I would do my intern I would finally find peace and understanding. People there would know what Interaction Design really was.

Well, that turned out not to be true. Most of the people I talked to described an Interaction Designer as someone who “knows a lot about and works with Flash and actionscript” or didn’t really know either.

During this search for answers and more clarity on the matter I started reading more and more articles, blogs, websites and books. Trying to come to a specific core.

Form this search I have found that Interaction Design can be spoken about in (at least) two layers.

• The underlying basic knowledge within Interaction Design
• The (specialized) practicle fields of application of Interaction Design

The underlying basic knowledge within Interaction Design (IxD)
This is the part of IxD that covers the goal, basic knowledge and general competences of IxD:

• goal: “defining and designing the behavior of artifacts, environments, and systems, as well as the formal elements that communicate that behavior” so that the end user will be able to achieve her goals without feeling stupid (Cooper, 2003).
• basic knowledge: human psychology (gestalt, mental models, way finding, etc)
• general competences: user research, flowcharts, wireframes, basic interface principles.

These are what I would call the basic competences an Interaction Designer needs. Since this part has been already explained in ways that are way better then I will be able to, I recommend you read the article “So You Want To Be An Interaction Designer“ at the Cooper website or, even more elaborate, the book “The Inmates Are Running The Assylum“. The part of IxD where I want to put my dime in the bag is that of the specializations.

The (specialized) practicle fields of application of Interaction Design
About the basic knowledge and competences of the IxD field a lot of people have written. And it seems that by now that part has pretty much settled. It seems to me that the people in the field (no matter what specialization) seem to agree on this part of IxD.

But still in conversations it seems that they don’t. When listening carefully you discover that both parties are much more close than seems at first hear. Most of the disagreement in conversations about IxD comes from the lack of distinction between the ‘basic knowledge’ and the ‘specialized field knowledge’. Simply said, even though an interface on the web is as much an interface as one on a mobile device, different aspects have to be taken into account for each.

The interface on the mobile device for example, will be most probably be used for short, low-level tasks. Whereas the interface on the web will most likely be used for longer periods at a time with a broader reach of application. This means that even though both interfaces will be designed with the use of gestalt theory, user testing, etc. (basic knowledge), the way and the intensity in which these will be used will be different for both (ignoring the fact of them being to different projects even without the difference of platform). What works with a web interface doesn’t need to work with the interface on a mobile device.

Concluding
What this means is the following. When talking about the field of IxD it has to be clear about which layer we are talking (basic or field) and if it is about a (specialized) field we need to make clear what field it is. Following we need to be very careful in trying to compare solutions of IxD across specializations. As said, they might translate very well, but then again they might just not. This doesn’t mean that either of the parties involved in the conversation is right or wrong. It just means that a solution has its limitations within a certain field of specialization.

Since my IxD highest interest (at this point in time) is in the web as software interface (Garett, 2003) the solutions, questions and problems I present on this weblog are first and foremost concerned with that specialization. In this way I hope to discuss these items and in the first place help move forward that field of specialization and IxD as field in general. In the second place I hope the articles, solutions and discussions will also be of value to the other IxD fields of specialization.

Enjoy, and please feel free to join the conversation.

Bibliography

Cooper, Alan and Robert Reimann. About Face 2. 0. New York: Wiley, 2003.

Garrett, Jesse. The Elements of User Experience. Indianapolis: New Riders, 2003.