Page 41 -

10 Chapter 1 What is interaction design?

What this means in practice is that confusion, misunderstanding, and com-
munication breakdowns can often surface in a team. The various team members
may have different ways of talking about design and may use the same terms to
mean quite different things. Other problems can arise when a group of people is
"thrown" together who have not worked as a team. For example, the Philips Vi-
sion of the Future Project found that its multidisciplinary teams-who were re-
sponsible for developing ideas and products for the future-experienced a
number of difficulties, namely, that project team members did not always have a
clear idea of who needed what information, when, and in what form (Lambourne
et al., 1997).

practice, the makeup of a given design team depends on the kind of interactive product
ing built. Who do you think would need to be involved in developing:
(a) a public kiosk providing information about the exhibits available in a science
museum?
(b) an interactive educational website to accompany a TV series?

Comment Each team will need a pumber of different people with different skill sets. For example, the
first interactive product would need:
(a) graphic and inteiaction designers, museum curators, educational advisors, software
engineers, software designers, usability engineers, ergonomists
The second project would need:
(b) TV producers, graphic and interaction designers, teachers, video experts, software
engineers, software designers, usability engineers
In addition, as both systeds are being developed for use by the general public, representa-
tive users, such as school children and parents, should be involved.
In practice, design teams often end up being quite large, especially if they are working on a
big project to meet a fixed deadline. For example, it is common to find teams of fifteen peo-
ple or more working on a website project for an extensive period of time, like six months.
This means that a number of people from each area of expertise are likely to be working as
part of the project team.

1.3.3 Interaction design in business

Interaction design is dbw big business. In particular, website consultants, start-
up companies, and mobile computing industries have all realized its pivotal role
in successful interactive hroducts. To get noticed in the highly competitive field
of web products requires standing out. Being able to say that your product is
easy and effective to use is seen as central to this. Marketing departments are re-
alizing how branding, the number of hits, customer return rate, and customer
satisfaction are greatly affected by the usability of a website. Furthermore, the
presence or absence of good interaction design can make or break a company.