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Before venturing into design, it pays to consider a few key questions. Answering them helps focus the creative process and drive the definition of interaction style.
First, think about the people being designed for. What is their primary activity? They may be studying, playing, browsing, watching, reading, searching, analyzing or composing. What is their attitude toward their role in that activity? It may be passive and receptive, active and energetic, casual and rhythmic. Together these factors help us understand the audience's motivations and intentions.
Consider the person's environment and the technology being used. Are they in a public space, in an office, in their living room or in the kitchen? What kind of hardware platform and hardware interface devices are they using? Do you envision them leaning over a kiosk's touch screen, holding a stylus and handheld computing device, pointing a remote keypad at a set-top box, or cupping their hand over a mouse, trackball, trackpad, or game machine's D-pad (directional pad)?
How about the general nature of the media being provided? Is it fluid like a movie, chunked like a slideshow, objectified like a set of building blocks, active like a game?
And what kind of relationship would you like to invite between participant and content? Just as literature presents first, second and third-person perspectives, so do computer interfaces. How do participants identify with the content? Are they interacting with the media directly, via the actions of a character or agent, or through a detached control device?
While any particular software (or hardware) interface can be made to accomplish almost any given task, the audience's experience is enhanced and directed most effectively when the interface elements complement the content at hand. And since the designs we put out into the world affect the people who use them, being thoughtful about the interactions we employ takes us all a long way towards developing more coherent and engaging experiences.