Design: Interaction Design

In March of 2011, I joined HP to lead the User Experience and Front-End Development organization for Consumer Travel. My goal? To design products that transform the future of travel. At the time, eleven UX professionals had already been working on the design for one of our travel applications for several months. Unfortunately, I had to throw the entire design away and start from scratch. Why? In addition to other challenges, the team could not articulate an interaction model. Read More

Links are one of the most foundational elements of connected digital technology. They long predate the Web and form the backbone of the whole concept of hypermedia.

Early on during the Web explosion, as everyone began making Web sites for their favorite hobby, then for their company, they simply sprinkled links across the landscape so people could learn more about a topic by following a link to a source document or just another Web site.

For a while, there were Webrings to bring related content together. Later, we saw link clouds. But somehow, we all settled on layers, layering top and side navigation bars on pages. We began to divorce the clicks from the content and developed the concepts of navigation and wayfinding.

But I’ve come to realize that there was a key nugget of truth in that first, most basic use of the link. Hypermedia means not just simply linking two things together, but giving the user an easy way to get more information about almost anything, with one click or tap. Read More

“Most design jargon deals with how to design rather than what to design and why.”—John Arnott

“I prefer design by experts—people who know what they are doing.”—Donald Norman

Interaction design is a blended endeavor of process, methodology, and attitude. Discussions of process and methodology are pervasive in the interaction design milieu and often revolve around a perceived tension between process and methodology and the role of design within this discipline. To be clear, process is the overarching design framework—for example, an iterative, or spiral, process or a sequential, or waterfall, process. Conversely, a methodology is a prescribed design approach such as user-centered design or genius design. Read More