About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design

as a unified whole in a relationship with its surroundings. As a result, it isn't possible to effectively design an interactive product by decomposing it into a list of atomic requirements and coming up with a design solution for each. Even a relatively simple product must be considered in totality and in light of its context in the world.

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

We discuss four main steps to designing interactive systems in this book: researching the domain, understanding the users and their requirements, defining the framework of a

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

interactive digital products are uniquely imbued with complex behavior.

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

► 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

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.

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.