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

“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

This is an excerpt from Chapter 5 of Jessica Enders’s new book Designing UX: Forms. 2016 SitePoint.

Chapter 5: Flow

Paper forms are static. Immobile, unresponsive, fixed. Forms come alive when they’re on the Web: questions can appear or hide, errors can be flagged and corrected, and the experience can be tailored to users and their needs.

In this chapter, we’ll see how to best design all these user interactions and more. Because we want the total user experience to feel smooth and painless—like gliding down a river—we’ll call this aspect of form design flow. Read More