13 Important lessons I’d want to pass on to new Interaction Designers
- Interaction design is about designing choose your own adventure stories. It’s simply a non-linear movie that allows your audience to choose their own path along the way.
- Understand the difference between designing applications and games. They are the same thing, they are just on opposite sides of the “purpose” spectrum. Applications are for getting something done as fast as possible, games are for challenging goals. Both create happiness and joy. There is a lot of gray area in-between applications and games, and the best interaction design includes some blend of both purposes depending on what your interactions are for.
- Understand and force yourself to think separately about Graphic Design, UI Design and Interaction Design. They are not the same, but they encompass each other. Graphic Design is fine art with a functional purpose, UI Design includes Graphic Design and is about creating an eye path. Interaction Design includes both UI and Graphic Design and is about a successive series of UIs that take users to end goals.
- Before anything else, read about the human brain. Start with the book Brain Rules by John Medina. Design is about communicating to brains and though we don’t have the human brain completely mapped out, it is still a machine with a simple set of rules.
- Understand that what makes a human brain happy is simply choosing goals that matter to the individual, working towards them and then accomplishing them. This is the basic formula to that chemical reaction we call joy and happiness.
- Once you understand the human brain machine, study the computer machine. Your whole purpose in life is to get the computer to talk to a human and guide that human towards a goal. Someday computers will be humanoid in behavior but until then we have to fake it as best we can.
- As a general rule, developers have spent more time coding than designing. They default to thinking more like a computer, and less like a human. The problem is that the scope of creating software is simply beyond your capacity to build alone. You have to rely on developers so you must learn how to persuade the developers to do things that benefit humans more than things that benefit them and the computer systems they create.
- The best way to understand developers is to be one for some period of time. Most designers hate development, which is natural, but if you don’t do development yourself for a time so you can “get it”, you’ll always be at the mercy of what you don’t know. Here’s another way to put it, who do you think is going to make a better building architect, the guy who has actually put up dry wall or the guy who hasn’t?
- HTML is not development, it’s simply a gateway drug. You must do PHP and MySQL (or something similar) or you’re wasting your time. When you’ve written your first class from scratch, and you understand how it’s a beautiful thing to write classes then you can stop :)
- Good interaction design comes from understanding and learning processes, patterns and standards. In my experience artists tend to avoid this kind of thing. But interaction design is so complex that these things are the only way to give yourself the necessary constraints to be creative in. Otherwise you’ll get lost in the complexity and never finish anything. The good news is that interaction is much more creative and fulfilling than graphic design or UI design alone so it’s worth the time to learn “the rules.”
- Fine art is about expressing whatever the hell you want. Interaction design is about what other people want, not what you want. This was critical for me in my own career development. Interaction design was not about what I wanted, I had to be able to put my user first. This is much harder than you might think. Everyone, even Alan Cooper, struggles with this. The best way to put your user first is lots of continual research and testing. “Research and testing,” I thought, “What? I’m an artist.” Interaction design is about getting inside someone else’s head, understanding how they think and helping them accomplish something they want to do. Research and testing is the most common way to accomplish this.
- You’ll also want to study game design because game designers have been doing interaction design with tons more time, money and resources than the web or software industry. Companies like EA have been designing interactions much bigger in scale and much more complex than any computer company. The game industry has found ways to solve problems the software industry hasn’t gotten to yet.
- Interaction design is about logic and impulse, you have to be a master of both to be successful. You’ll always fail at interaction design until you can start and stop your impulsive artist side at will.
