February Meeting Review:
Three Two Guys on Interaction Design

by Rob Brown, LSC Member

Perot Systems Interaction Designer Vic Case’s pet peeve is when his technical colleagues confuse interaction design with visual design. “I am not a visual designer. Graphic design definitely has functional value, but interaction design defines how a system behaves in response to the person using it. It is much more than just visual design,” he says.

The Lone Star Community hosted interaction designers Vic Case and Kevin Mattice from Perot Systems in a panel discussion entitled “ Three Two Guys on Interaction Design” at its February 7 th meeting. The third panel member was ill and unable to attend.

Vic has worked with interactive software development since 1991. For several years he focused on interactive multimedia training as an instructional designer. He migrated to designing and developing Web sites and joined an Internet consultancy, where he worked as an Information Architect for major corporate business-to-business and consumer Web sites. He has been at Perot Systems since 2001 supporting the Tenet Healthcare account. Vic has experience in designing user interfaces and interactions for both Web and Windows applications.

Kevin Mattice has worked as instructional designer, interaction designer, 2D and 3D illustrator, and technical writer. With recent experience at the Department of Homeland Security and Travelocity.com, Kevin currently works for Perot Systems as a User Experience (UX) Architect specializing in the design of Web- and desktop-based user experiences for the healthcare industry.

Interaction Design Defined

So just what exactly is interaction design? This somewhat academic definition comes from Wikipedia:

“Interaction Design (IxD) is the discipline of defining the behavior of products and systems that a user can interact with. Typically, the practice centers on complex high-technology systems such as software, mobile devices, and other electronic devices. However, it can also apply to other types of products and services, and even organizations themselves. Interaction design defines the behavior (the "interaction") of an artifact or system in response to its users.”

Vic and Kevin provided their own more workaday explanation:

“Interaction design defines how a system behaves in response to the person using it. By incorporating the user’s needs, desires and goals in the design, user experience designers work with business analysts and developers to create an interaction that is both simple and usable.”

Putting Interaction Design to Work

Kevin and Vic outlined a four-step process showing how interaction design usually takes place when it is part of an information technology project:

1. User-experience designers and business analysts gather requirements and interview users.



2. Information architects develop an interactive prototype in Axure RP Pro, or non-interactive wireframes in Microsoft Visio.



3. Demonstrate the prototype to the business decision makers and development team.



4. Validate the design’s ease of use through usability testing.

Key Players Leverage Interaction Designs

Vic and Kevin stressed that once complete, their interaction designs do not sit on a shelf getting dusty. Instead, the project team members actively used the designs. Business decision makers use the interaction designs to envision how an application’s functionality will actually work in the hands of the users. Developers use the interaction designs to help determine how to code interface behaviors. Usability analysts present interaction design prototypes to potential users to see how well the designs work in practice. Quality assurance team members test the user interaction designs to evaluate how well the final code compares to the behavior defined in the design.

Interaction Designs Importance

Interaction design enhances the quality of a product through improving marketability, increasing user accuracy and safety, improving user acceptance, decreasing training, reducing operating costs, and streamlining business processes. All this contributes to a more satisfying user experience by reducing steps, eliminating “friction” by reducing mental and physical work, and preventing predictable errors.

Good Interaction Design Principals

Vic and Kevin described several core principals that must be met in every superior interaction design:

Every user experience with a Web site or application involves many “micro interactions” such as entering data into a field, moving the cursor across a window to click a button, reading a field label, selecting an action from a menu list, and so forth. Each of these micro-interactions by itself is relatively insignificant, yet when taken together they form the user’s overall experience, so good interaction design must be applied to each micro-interaction. A good interaction designer will try to design out predictable errors, for example making sure that back-end code allows a phone number to be entered either with or without dashes. “Otherwise you are just setting the user up to fail,” said Vic.

Little failures like this are like little cuts, or nicks, on your body. One nick won’t kill you, but a thousand nicks will cause you to bleed to death. The same is true for the user experience. “Too many little failures, and the user will avoid your application,” said Kevin.

Good interaction design must always include attention to:

• Text (copywriting, field labels)
• Technology ( AJAX versus straight HTML)
• Visual design (layout, positioning, proximity, typography)

Also consider the user role and task analysis during interaction design so that the solutions fit both the user and the context of the task.

“There is a trade-off between the simplicity of the interaction design and the power of the application, and you constantly have to work to find a balance between the two,” said Vic.

A certain amount of art exists as well as science in interaction design, so that an aspect of subjectivity is always present. The best designs occur when that subjectivity is tempered by years of seeing what works and what doesn’t in user interaction, Vic said.

Getting Started

Vic and Kevin both started their careers as technical communicators, and said it was their frustration with having to document poor user interfaces that spurred them to advocate for better interaction design. As technical communication professionals, we can start to promote better interaction design in our products by ensuring we and the rest of the project team really know who the product users are and how they will use it. We can learn more of the interaction design vocabulary by studying the references listed on the last slide of their presentation.

Vic and Kevin urged us to consider multiple approaches for a solution, instead of relying on the same interface for all solutions. One way to do this is to look for real-life examples—see how persons accomplish this or a similar task without a computer. Another approach is to ask for opinions from others outside the project.

Finally, as a technical communication professional, you can start developing simple prototypes of different solutions, and then start performing some simple usability testing.

Before you know it, you will be on the road to becoming an interaction designer yourself! Your users will thank you.

For more information

Go to the last slide in Vic and Kevin’s presentation at http://ux/prchealth.com/ID for a list of books, articles, and Web sites.