How Do You Design Interaction?
https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2014/07/how-do-you-design-interaction/
“UI design starts with words”. I guess this was something I’d never really considered. As a graphic designer, I usually begin my process by drawing and sketching as the author mentioned he himself does as well. During the process of getting a design started there are definitely times when I’m jotting down keywords while sketching, but the idea of a “human-computer” conversation is completely foreign to me.
Going off of the author’s suggestion I also checked out the article by Intercom titled “The Dribbblisation of Design”. This in itself was a pretty sweet read. This article discusses that while there are great resources out there for designers to share work, this also has its downfall. They particularly mention the site Dribble and how designers critiquing each others work on this site in particular are missing the whole point of great design. Getting to the root of the communication problem and finding a visually appealing way of correcting it. “Too many designers are designing to impress their peers rather than discuss real business problems.”
The design world is competitive and can sometimes even feel superficial, but how about impressing the user through your design’s functionality? I’ve worked in the field of advertising and as this article mentions, creative work can turn more into winning awards than finding design solutions. Did it sell more of Xproduct? Who cares, it looked great. This is one of the leading reasons why I decided to continue my education in the field of UX/UI design, because it’s designing with purpose and substance.
Getting back to the original article, “How Do You Design Interaction?”, the idea of “talking out” an interaction is discussed. What a simple and effective way to understand the process you’re trying to find a solution for. By comparing the interaction with a computer to the interaction with a person, you humanize the process and in doing so hopefully create a more user friendly process. The author then takes his “conversations” and turns them into a flow and sketch. He does this with many different variations of the “conversation” and comes up with different scenarios that could occur between the user and the technology. He doesn’t credit this as his only way of designing interaction solutions, his point is just to credit his use of conversation as a guiding tool in the process.
Thinking back to the first UX project I did last semester (a redesign of a website with the intention of making it more user friendly and intuitive) I wish I would have had this “conversation tool” up my sleeve. I feel like it definitely would have provided a more human element to my designs, even just in the way of verbiage. The copy I used on the site would have flowed more as a conversation, rather than just a well thought out list of options. This use of including conversation as a tool to help mold your users’ interaction with your technology is definitely something I plan on trying
out in the future.
