Column: On Good Behavior

My last column, “Specifying Behavior,” focused on the importance of interaction designers’ taking full responsibility for designing and clearly communicating the behavior of product user interfaces. At the conclusion of the Design Phase for a product release, interaction designers’ provide key design deliverables that play a crucial role in ensuring their solutions to design problems actually get built. These deliverables might take the form of high-fidelity, interactive prototypes; detailed storyboards that show every state of a user interface in sequence; detailed, comprehensive interaction design specifications; or some combination of these. Whatever form they take, producing these interaction design deliverables is a fundamental part of a successful product design process.

In this installment of On Good Behavior, I’ll provide an overview of a product design process, then discuss some indispensable activities that are part of an effective design process, with a particular focus on those activities that are essential for good interaction design. Although this column focuses primarily on activities that are typically the responsibility of interaction designers, this discussion of the product design process applies to all aspects of UX design. Read More

In my column, On Good Behavior, I’ll explore the essentials of good interaction design. This first column provides a brief introduction to interaction design—defining the scope this column will cover—then explores some key design principles. What is interaction design? Here’s the definition I wrote for the UXmatters Glossary:

“Interaction design defines workflows that support users’ goals and tasks, the affordances through which digital products and services communicate their functionality and interactivity to users, the ways in which users can interact with those affordances, products’ behaviors in response to user interactions, and the methods by which products indicate state changes. Good interaction design facilitates people’s tasks and ensures that digital products are both learnable and usable by reducing complexity as much as possible, preventing user error, adhering to standards when appropriate, and through consistency across an entire product or product line. Typical interaction design deliverables include specifications, wireframes, usage scenarios, and prototypes.”

As you can see, interaction design is a complex design discipline that must take many different factors into account to solve a wide range of design problems. So, how do interaction designers get their heads around wicked design problems? Read More

Over the last few years, I’ve been noticing a disturbing trend in UX design: changes in the design of successful software user interfaces that actually degrade rather than enhance the user experience. This seems to happen for a variety of reasons—for example, because of

• designers conforming slavishly to current design trends such as minimalism or flat design rather than focusing on meeting users’ needs
• companies’ leaders wanting their UX designers to create “cool” rather than usable user interfaces
• UX teams not doing usability testing or other user research that would validate a new design approach rather than being committed to doing user-centered design
• designers disregarding the power of users’ kinesthetic memory when rethinking application layouts rather than giving it the respect that it warrants
• designers succumbing to the egotistical desire to put their personal stamp on the design of software user interfaces rather than recognizing and preserving the value that products have long provided to users
• designers making changes for the sake of change alone rather than strategically driving change to deliver greater value to users
• companies engaging in feature wars with their competitors—causing their software user interfaces to become bloated with unnecessary features—rather than striving to differentiate their offerings in the marketplace
• companies crafting user experiences that selfishly further their business goals rather than deriving business value by meeting users’ needs better
• companies releasing software whose quality is not up to snuff because they’ve rushed it to market without adequate testing and debugging

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