The discipline of interface design is varied because the term "interface" means different things to different people, depending on their particular training and expertise. Stereotypically, content experts focus on organization and flow. Visual and industrial designers focus on the presentation of the product. Cognitive psychologists focus on the participant's process and problems over time. And engineers focus on the implementation of software mechanisms. Not only do these multiple foci overlap, but they are intimately interrelated and ultimately inseparable.
DOMAINS of UI DESIGN: Information design regards the content's architecture. Interface design regards the sensory aspects of usability. Interaction design regards the ways we invite people to act. (Click on a domain for more detail.)
In gross terms, "interface" encompasses the place where the person and the system meet. It's the point of contact, the boundary and the bridge between the content and the reader. In electronic media, it includes everything from the organization of the material to the layout of the screen, the audification of the space, and the way people use their hands and fingers. Because it encompasses so much, we've found it useful to break interface design into three general domains of design (each of which individually draws on a combination of skills from different disciplines). This helps to identify problems, issues or questions, and to address them with solutions of appropriate scale. These domains are information design, interface design and interaction design.
Information design is about the organization of the content and the architectural shell that holds it. During this phase of design, we are mainly concerned with where and when portions of media are accessible.
In interactive information systems, there's a fascinating paradox that calls our conception of the relationship between reader and content into question. One typically refers to the user as "moving through data," but this phrase is quite ambiguous. On one hand, a participant might be manipulating content in front of them. On the other, the participant might be traveling through a landscape of media. That example is purely semantic, but in many contexts, spatial navigation and content organization are quite blurred. Notice how long it takes to get from the action of picking up a novel to the experience of being in the story.
In a large data space, the participant steps in as a visitor. In a museum, we must walk from piece to piece and from room to room. Most likely the relationships in between pieces were crafted to add another layer of form to the experience. Spending time in a piece of architecture will most likely lead the browser to experience something deeper. This deeper sense might or might not be conscious, developing your cognitive understanding of the message in the works or affecting you emotionally and kinesthetically.
In a data space smaller than the reader, it would initially appear that the person stays planted in front of the media. Take, for example, a pile of photographs. Clearly the shuffler is not in the place depicted. But, as they spend time spreading pictures out on the floor and grouping them together in different ways, they start to leave the room and enter into the world of the content. In this case, the relationship with the organization at a kinesthetic, creative or cognitive level leads the participant into feeling a sense of place in the media.
From a design perspective, it helps to keep both kinds of relationships in mind simultaneously. Otherwise, the resulting organizational or navigational architecture may end up conveying a completely different message than what was in mind. So, look at the content from the top and the bottom by asking where's the participant in the media and how does the media get to them. Evaluate models where users move data, and models where users move themselves through data.
During the creation of a navigational structure, the three most important questions to envision the participant asking are: Where am I? How did I get here? and Where can I go? Then we ask: How might my audience feel coming into this section of the product? What am I inviting them to think or feel while they're here? What do I hope they take with them when they leave?
People have a variety of learning styles and ways of relating to the world around them, so at first it may appear difficult to define a single structure to accommodate all potential users. A single model might work great for some people and poorly for others, but an overlapping network of models might be a compromise that gets everyone lost. These issues can often be resolved by using the message you want to get across in the product as the foundation for its design.
For example, if producing a site about a culture where the relationships between people and social institutions are something other than hierarchical, be sure not to use a hierarchical system of choices for navigating through the content. We might try links between screens that are more representative of the kinds of interpersonal relationships that exist in that culture.
There's a myriad of other issues to consider during information design, from strategies for accomplishing meaningful relationships between content and form to pace and the balance of agency between authors and participants.
Interface design is about the sensory aspects of usability. In this phase, we manage the meeting of information design and interaction design. We ask why the participant should take action and how they should know how to do so. We nail down the perspective being presented and determine what the actual interface will be made of. What will it look like? What will it sound like? How will the media organization be presented? What affordances will be used to define the interactions people will be able to engage in?
Many engineering and marketing managers confuse interface design with content design. While the fruits of these two disciplines may share a design language and be interwoven with the content's visual or auditory form, there are significant differences between them as aspects of production. A usefully narrow definition of interface would specify it as the means by which the content is accessed, providing mediation between the content's organization and the person's actions. In office computing, we have a lot of extremely well organized and easy to use software that is not incredibly attractive. Graphic design is about beautiful presentation. In multimedia, where we readily make use of graphic design talent, it's quite common to find a gorgeous product that is either poorly organized or kind of confusing to use. Success on one side doesn't ensure success on the other. Thus, the task and challenge is to recognize the difference and make sure both are addressed.
Widely accepted interface elements are both easy and safe to implement. Not only are recognized standards easy for people to use, but development toolkits provide mechanisms for easily incorporating them. For example, if you want to give someone a choice, simply throw up a button for each option or two, or three, or 14. Right? Not necessarily. First there are limits to the number of options people can (or want to) deal with at a time. Further, buttons are a very specific type of interaction device with a very specific message associated with their use. (Granted, the nature of that message is open to debate, or more practically, open to a usability study.)
Many designers believe that people are accustomed to clicking on buttons and won't be able to figure anything else out. But take a look at someone using a multimedia product and notice how many times they click on each button. What's the second click for? Good luck? People aren't necessarily even using buttons the way one would expect them to. They're applying their experience opening folders on the desktop. Apparently, there isn't such a thing as an intuitive computer interface after all. But there are things one can keep in mind that will help. The point here is that it is quite possible to design novel interfaces that people will easily figure out and learn to use comfortably.
On the engineering side, the current crop of object-oriented development tools make it fairly elementary to code up, sub-class and instantiate totally novel interface styles, so we don't buy the prefab toolkit excuse either. The trick is striking a balance between time, budget and quality of experience. If you don't come up with the next great interface alternative and take the credit for doing cool groundbreaking work, someone else will. Standards are meant to be broken. But there's got to be a good reason to do so, and the solution must be thoroughly tested.
We try as hard as we can, early in the development cycle, to get designs in front of people from our target audience. No amount of intuition is going to really be able to tell how well a solution will work for any particular set of content. We create multiple designs and watch people play with them. We look for where they have trouble and what helps them feel grounded. Then, pick and choose the aspects from each of those designs that succeed in getting the right results. We'll explore practical ways to strengthen your interfaces and get them to say what you want.
Interaction design is about the ways products invite people to act. Its sole concern is "How do they do it?"
Children are easily affected by their environment and the models of the world imposed on them by adults. How they are expected to act and what they are expected to do shapes what they do and how they end up doing it. How we interact with each other and with ourselves over time affects our growth and development into who we are. It's our position that interactions with machines have no less an impact on people.
A major consumor electronics manufacturer came to our development team asking us to create the next generation user interface for their new game device. They requested one so easy and cool to use that people would use it not only for games but to play music and other disc based media, actually replacing the use of traditional stereo components and remotes. As if that wasn't challenge enough, we couldn't help but feel we had another serious obligation to our target audience. The design constraint we put on ourselves was to come up with an interface that not only satisfied the client's requests, but did so using an interaction style that provided an alternative to the kinds of interactions people would typically be engaged in when playing games. We looked at existing video games and found that the types of interactions people engaged with on these machines tended to be state-based, objectified and adrenaline-driven, frequently making use of penetrating audiovisual feedback. We wanted to offer players the possibility of another way of being in relation to their world. With this clear focus, we were able to rapidly generate several variations, each based on a different potential emotional relationship with and attitude about the media.
The interesting outcome was that the client was most pleased with the design at the farthest end of the spectrum away from traditional engagement paradigms -- the one that embodied the antitheses of video game playing. Without the addition of our own politically motivated design constraint, we would have never come up with a solution that addressed their needs so completely. So, rather than second guessing clients and markets, we recommend producing products with an integrity that you know your customers will feel, then sell it as market differentiation.
What kind of relationship with content do you want your users to have? How close do you want them to be to the media? How do you want them to feel in their bodies as they engage? The kinds of interactions we all design into all of our products answer these questions, whether we think about it consciously or not.
No one knows exactly where this industry or technology will take us in the future. But continuously reminding ourselves that we are beginners opens the door to challenging our own assumptions about what we think we are doing and how we are affecting our audience. Other areas of this site explore several different styles of interaction in depth, covering the kinds of statements they make, when they are appropriate, how to choose the right set of interaction techniques for a particular product and how to justify those decisions to the boss.
