About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design

interactive digital products are uniquely imbued with complex behavior.

According to Gestalt Theory, people perceive a thing not as a set of individual features and attributes but

While clearly a close relative of interaction design, mainstream IA still retains a somewhat limited, Web-centric view of organizing and navigating content using pages, links, and minimally interactive widgets. However, recent industry trends such as Web 2.0 and rich Internet applications have begun to open the eyes of Web designers, causing them t

solution, and filling in the design details. Many practitioners wouldadd a fifth step: validation, testing the effectiveness of a solution with users. This is part of a discipline widely known as usability.

Most manufactured objects are quite simple, and even complex mechanical products are quitesimple when compared to most software and software-enabled products that can be compiled from over one million lines of code (compare this to a mechanical artifact of overwhelming complexity such as the space shuttle, which has 250,000 parts, only a small perc

► Understanding users' desires, needs, motivations, and contexts► Understanding business, technical, and domain opportunities, requirements, and constraints► Using this knowledge as a foundation for plans to create products whose form, content, and behavior is useful, usable, and desirable, as well as economically viable and technically feasible

capability, viability, and desirability (see Figure 1-3). If any one of these three foundations is significantly weak in a product, it is unlikely to stand the test of time.

If we design and construct products in such a way that the people who use them achieve their goals, these people will be satisfied, effective, and happy and will gladly pay for the products and recommend that others do the same.

In other words, instead of saving a dollar on the construction of each widget, you save a million dollars by making the precisely needed quantity of the most desirable product.Once a software program has been successfully written, it can be reproduced an unlimited number of times for virtually nothing. There is little benefit in reducing the cost o