Interaction Design

It's been a crazy past two weeks with all the midterms, career fairs, and job interviews. I've been slowly catching up with the readings for my HCI class. Last time we met, Prof. Robertson assigned me a new book to read called Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction.

The book starts out with some basic intro about interaction design. Comparing good and poorly designed products such as voicemail systems and remote controls. I noticed that these books likes to pick on telephone/voicemail as an example of poorly designed products. It's also interesting that in today's world, we still continue to use those poorly designed products. The book defined interaction design as "designing products to support the way people communicate and interact in their everyday and working lives." I understand that interaction design is the bigger picture and HCI is just one aspect of it. There are many different types of discipline that's involved in interaction design. The book explained some of the benefits and negatives of this. The biggest pro of having people from different disciplines and backgrounds come together is the creation of more ideas coming from different perspectives. This could lead to more creativity. This however is also the biggest con. The clashing of different ideas could lead to conflicts and confusion. Some prefer to do it a certain way while others have their own ways of doing things. The book also mentioned the different usability goals and use experience goals that we have to think about while in the process of interaction design. The text also used the design principles that I read from Donald Norman.

In order to create good designed products, designers has to do some research on the consumers. Chapter 7 of the text covered the different ways of gathering data. Data recording, interviews, surveys/questionnaires, and observations are some of the main ways to gather data.

I have a lot more to read so more to come later.