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What is interaction desig n?

1 .I Introduction
1.2 Good and poor design
1.2.1 What to design
1.3 What is interaction design?
1.3.1 The makeup of interaction design
1.3.2 Working tog ether as a multidisciplinary team
1 3.3 Interaction design in business
1.4 What is involved in the process of interaction design?
1.5 The goals of interaction design
1.5.1 Usability goals
1.5.2 User experience goals
1.6. More on usability: design and usability principles

1.1 Introduction

How many interactive products are there in everyday use? Think for a minute
about what you use in a typical day: cell phone, computer, personal organizer, re-
mote control, soft drink machine, coffee machine, ATM, ticket machine, library in-
formation system, the web, photocopier, watch, printer, stereo, calculator, video
game.. . the list is endless. Now think for a minute about how usable they are.
How many are actually easy, effortless, and enjoyable to use? All of them, several,
or just one or two? This list is probably considerably shorter. Why is this so?
Think about when some device caused you considerable grief-how much time
did you waste trying to get it to work? Two well-known interactive devices that
cause numerous people immense grief are the photocopier that doesn't copy the
way they want and the VCR that records a different program from the one they
thought they had set or none at all. Why do you think these things happen time and
time again? Moreover, can anything be done about it?
Many products that require users to interact with them to carry out their tasks
(e.g., buying a ticket online from the web, photocopying an article, pre-recording a TV
program) have not necessarily been designed with the users in mind. Typically, they
have been engineered as systems to perform set functions. While they may work effec-
tively from an engineering perspective, it is often at the expense of how the system will
be used by real people. The aim of interaction design is to redress this concern by