How Doing Interaction Design Helped My Product Design (Draft)

June 5, 2004

This article on how “aesthetics recede as behavior becomes more important”, a view put forth by Bill Moggridge, a founder of IDEO, points to an important emerging trend in the design world. The work of Naoto Fukasawa, a Japanese designer most famous for his “Without Thought” series, highlights a growing trend in product design toward desiging the behavior of the product—how it will be used by the customer. It is a leap of quantum complexity from simply desiging surfaces (also valuable, says Virginia Postrel), because it takes into account the individual user’s situation. The days of the “one best way” are likely gone for product design, and the future lies in products that can be customized and produced for specific individuals.

This vibes with the argument of The Experience Economy, which says that the natural next step for the economic progression is from a service economy to an experience economy. The simultaneous product transformation is from items used to perform a standard task to items produced to elicit a response from an individual person—for whom each product must be customized to work properly. The technological advance necessary to enable this is the ability to do “mass customization”, to create an individualized product on-the-fly, ideally with no more effort than it takes to currently “mass produce” an item.

Dell owes nearly all their success to this philosophy. The PC computer is inherently a collection of smaller parts, of which each computer user needs only a specific set. Their breakthrough was realizing that in assembling computers, it is just as easy to put 512 MB of RAM in one PC and 128 MB in the next as it is to put 128 MB in both, and it allows you to sell to an additional buyer who wouldn’t have been satisfied with the “standard” model.

Computer-based interaction design “gets” this philosophy. Because of the low startup and prototyping costs—every new interface designed uses the same hardware to create it, and the incremental materials cost of another prototype is zero—interaction designers can prototype and test dozens of versions of a product in the time it would take a physical product designer to create just one. As David Kelley says, “fail faster to succeed sooner”—that is what interaction designers, because of their medium, are able to do.

Because of this unique medium and the rapid development it enables, interaction design has progressed with a speed unmatched by any field in history. Certainly an emerging industry makes advances faster than a mature one—but instead of plateauing off as most industries do, interaction design has embraced Moore’s Law of exponential growth, and the interfaces it creates are developing at the same rate.

So as product design sees an increasing need for pleasing “behaviors” of items, interaction designers possess an incredible head start in the design and production of interactive products, with an emphasis on enjoyable behavior.

Technical expertise is increasingly outsourced to India, China, and Japan, who have made significant investment in their ability to produce and optimize the efficiency of products. What is needed now in product design is creators skilled in the way products relate to individual, unique people. Those with experience creating individual style, empathy, and love will be the ones who find success in this field.

I’ll start a running list in the comments to this article of ways that interaction and web design have taught me empathy, style, and love in ways that can apply to the real world. More to come…

  1. Information vs. Knowledge - Mar 07, 2003
  2. The Death of Design - Feb 17, 2003

Comments

  1. Bob:

    Pop-up ads annoy online; fold-out and thick-paper ads annoy in magazines.

  2. Bob:

    As experiences become the focal point of design, time-related elements (such as loading time on the web, time spent in line for an experience) become more important than static design elements (like shapes, colors, and materials).

  3. Bob:

    Just as drop-down menus aren’t useful (unless part of an often-used application) because users don’t know the contents, products that have hidden affordances are often wasting material complexity on functions that will go unused. Peter Merholz calls this Explicit Design—the idea that every interface should be “fully revealed or expressed without vagueness, implication, or ambiguity : leaving no question as to meaning or intent.” Donald Norman refers to these traits in product design as “affordances”:

    I introduced the term affordance to design in my book, “The Psychology of Everyday Things” (POET: also published as “The Design of …”). The concept has caught on, but not always with true understanding. Part of the blame lies with me: I should have used the term “perceived affordance,” for in design, we care much more about what the user perceives than what is actually true. What the designer cares about is whether the user perceives that some action is possible (or in the case of perceived non-affordances, not possible)…In product design, where one deals with real, physical objects, there can be both real and perceived affordances, and the two need not be the same. In graphical, screen-based interfaces, all that the designer has available is control over perceived affordances.

  4. Bob:

    I’ve forgotten the most important parallel between interaction/web design and product design: Personalization. Just as we expect our websites to deliver a personalized experience, we should be able to expect products to tailor themselves to our unique needs.

  5. Bob:

    Dennis Miller, interviewing David Brooks from the NYTimes and commenting on Costco:

    I don’t know about you, but I go to Costco for the clarity. I go there and the aisles are well lit, everything is organized in big piles…

    Why can’t we expect that of all places? Marketing has overcome usability in retail, to the detriment of those stores whose customers are trying to spend money with them.

  6. Bob:

    Jason Kottke writes about poor usability of magazines:

    I realize that with all the excitement around the Debuting Fiction in the magazine, you probably forgot, just this once, to run the magazine through The Condé Nast Magazine Usability Lab. And also that UBS probably loves the fact that their exhaustively-honed advertising copy is flopping down in front of the hilarious literary stylings of David Sedaris like a pop up ad on the web and precipitating a post (with a link, no less) on a personal web site of modest acclaim. But this flap, it’s seriously annoying. Please make it go away from all future issues of your magazine.

  7. Bob:

    Another thing you learn in the interactive industries is that you should rarely “lock in” to a proprietary system. That means you design for Mozilla and make concessions for IE, not the other way around. It means coding to the W3C’s standards first and trendy presentation styles second.

    This idea has siblings in product design as well—a friend is resisting a “permanent” medical solution in hopes that less intrusive methods will improve her situation soon; I regret my decision to get Maryland Bridges to replace my missing front teeth because the process removed permanent parts of my real teeth, especially now that a new process promises to grow replacement teeth naturally; a 37signals discussion laments the way a trendy watch requires you to cut the strap permanently to adjust the fit.

  8. Bob:

    It seems that copyright and intellectual property for product design may also follow the same patterns we see on the web. Currently people are outraged at others “stealing” their CSS layouts, their images and photos; but many are coming around to see that it doesn’t really hurt anyone to copy their CSS, and that the real value on the web is not in protecting your content but rather in being hired to create new, unique things.

    In similar fashion, product designers will never be able to protect their designs worldwide and for all time; international trade has made piracy of ideas rampant, especially with cheaper manufacturing in other places. But if you can always be the first person to come up with a good idea, you’ll have a while to capitalize on it and also gain a solid reputation as an innovator. But you can’t coast along on one good accomplishment anymore; you have to be good, not just have good things…

  9. Bob:

    One feature that comes up often in interaction design is what I call “contextual controls”. Rather than having all your controls in one place (say, a control “panel”), you provide little bits of functionality right where the user needs them.

    So if you are looking at a small container on the page, the controls to change it are linked right from the header of that container; a blog entry has an edit link at the end of the text; right-clicking on highlighted text gives you options for that selection. This is in contrast to the normal WIMP interface, which expects you to do all your work through docked windows and menus. It also goes further than progressive disclosure, which merely shows you all the options, in one place, one at a time.

    The analogy to product design is that a user should not have to search for controls of a product they are using. The Seqway scooter is a remarkable example of this—lean forward, it goes; lean back, it stops. However, the way you turn it is the opposite—the user must press buttons on the right or left side of the handlebar, which changes the speed of each wheel to turn the vehicle.

    A far better solution would have been to sense the rider’s leaning and turn automatically—having the controls follow the user, not the other way around.

  10. Bob:

    Luke Wroblewski writes Why Learn Interface Design?:

    In other words, displays are available in more places, used by more people, and have more responsibility than ever before. As Stephen Johnson puts it, “The most dynamic and innovative region of the modern world reveals itself to us only through the anonymous middlemen of interface design.”

  11. Bob:

    Many product designs now incorporate personalization, like websites do. However, they still demand “logins” or other explicit ways of the user telling the product who they are.

    A better way might be to simulate “cookies” in the real world. Just as cookies online save the last user as the default (you are automatically logged in at Amazon even without explicitly doing so), cookies in products should recognize a user automatically and use their settings as default.

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