Why Interaction Design Matters

This morning I came across the below video on “interaction design”.   What struck me from this video is not only the topic itself but rather how the topic of interaction was explained. It was simple, yet brilliant.

The video refers to interaction design “as the design of interactions between people and things.” (1)

Rich Ziade says in the attached video that "the design [in the general sense of giving form or structure to something] around the interaction actually thinks about the dialogue and the flow of the experience that [a customer] is going to have with a product." (2)

As I think about the brand of Saint Mary’s Press, I think about the hundreds of thousands of titles that are sold each year. And then I think about the words that our customers have consistently used over the years to explain their experiences of interacting with our product. They use words including:  

accessible - engaging - relevant.

Those words are not just nice descriptors that we should use in marketing, but rather point to and mark the type of interaction our customers have had in the use of our products, as they have been in dialogue with our products, as they have interacted with our products and as they have forged a path through our products. 

Those words and the reality they point to are labeling not a product, but an experience, not just the words or the look of the product but the sum total of an interaction.

No matter what type of product we are developing, whether we are creating a digital product, a website, or the three legs of the development stool are gathered around a table revising a curriculum, it is the following we must keep in front of us. 

What we are creating and influencing on a daily basis are the dynamics of the dialogue or the interaction between our products and our customers,  “the flow of the experience that [our customers] are going to have  with our product”. (3)  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCeL5ByBwt0&context=C3c99e45ADOEgsToPDskIH_KgIc0Rp7J24kEYRr5eD

1-Sketchcaster. "Why Interaction
   Design Matters." YouTube.
   Web. 31 Jul 2007.
2-Ibid.
3-Ibid.
4-Ibid.