A Students Guide to Interaction Design
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Preface
goals: This guide is aimed at students who want to develop new products, services, software or websites. We cover the whole interaction design process in a brief and understandable way and enable students to understand the most important terms so that they can read the literature.
No-Goals: Include material that is non-relevant for practical work.
Introduction and Foundations
What is Interaction Design?
I suppose when you hear about "Interaction Design" you probably think about computer applications. He or she will probably decide how the functions of the software are represented to the user as icons or menu entries. You are not wrong with these assumptions: The most people who work as "Interaction Designer" deal with applications or websites and among other things they design what appears on the computer screen. But in addition an Interaction Designer researches as well which functionality people actually require or could need and they test as well if the ideas they have do actually work. The predecessors of the current interaction designers are the product designers like Dieter Rahms. He designed products for the German company Braun which show many aspects of modern interaction design: They are easy to use, form follows function and feature a elegant and minimalist design. If you say it in an extreme way you even could say that a handaxe is a great example of good design: It provides a good tool and it is easy to see how one can use it. If we look back in time and see that there are many things that seem to be "Interaction Design" we could wonder that we need an own discipline for it! So how comes?