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Designing Interactions

Today Bill Moggridge gave an interesting presentation about interaction design at IDII. For those unfamiliar with Moggridge, he is one of the co-founders of IDEO and now responsible for the San Francisco location, for proposing new directions for the company and for international services. Moggridge is in addition working on a book titled “Designing Interactions”, to be published by MIT Press in 2005. Not surprisingly it was Moggridge who coined the name Interaction Design. In his presentation he described interaction design as “the design of interactive technology for people.”

Interaction design is
the design of interactive
technology for people.

In his presentation Moggridge discussed 6 different categories of interaction design: games, screens, products, places, services and internet. Each category was then exemplified by a number of cases and interviews with industry leaders. For example, in the category “screens” Bill Atkinson and Larry Tessler talk about their work bringing the GUI to the Apple Lisa (based on technology from Xerox PARC), including extending the paradigm of pull-down menus (note: Jef Raskin was also involved in developing interface components and began to work on a small project in 1979, that would encompass a $500 business machine code-named Macintosh.)

Furthermore, in the category “internet” Larry Page and Sergey Brin elaborate on some of the design choices (or lack thereof in my opinion) for the Google interface. Moggridge added that Google made some sensible and appropriate design choices. However, personally, I think the Google interface could be significantly improved to result in a more efficient (in organizing and designing search results) and pleasing to use interface. In early 2004 Andrei Herasimchuk decided to redesign Google’s results page for educational purposes (see in addition his second iteration.) Andrei leaves Google’s distinct (though rather primitive) branding intact and improves a number of interface features and reshapes the way information, namely the search results page, is displayed.

After the lecture there was a more informal Q&A session and I got a chance to talk to Moggridge and discuss some of his work at IDEO. Before leaving for dinner Moggridge donated a deck of IDEO Method Cards to IDII. These cards show 51 of the methods IDEO uses to inspire great design and keep people at the center of their design process. I will most probably discuss the cards (and their potential usefulness and applicability) in more detail once I have had a more thorough look at them.

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