A good start in defining this discipline is referring to the most acknowledged in the field Gillian Crampton Smith. Gillian, in the work entitled; What is Interaction Design? - describes Interaction Design as, "Shaping our everyday life through digital artifacts: for work, for play, and for entertainment".
Its the shaping of our lives through interactive technologies such as computers, telecommunications, mobile phones etc. Its designing for usability, utility, satisfaction, communicative qualities, and its designing for sociability and interactivity.
Bill Morggridge in Designing Interactions puts forward that, "When we design a computer -based system of device, we're designing not just what it looks like but how it behaves. We're designing the quality of how we and it interact". This is where the skills of the interactive Designer comes in and the process of creations begins.
Interaction Design includes the work of human-computer interaction professionals, computer scientists, software engineers, cognitive psychologists, sociologists, cultural anthropologists and designers. It is the process of designing something that humans interact with.
A good graphic to provide understanding of where Interactive Design fits into the rest of the design world can be found here: Usability Typepad.
When distinguishing goals for Interactive Design Preece, Rogers and Sharp in Interaction Design: Beyond Human Computer Interaction express that "The goals of interactive products to be fun, enjoyable, pleasurable, aesthetically pleasing and so on are concerned primarily with the user experience". Here is a diagram explaining the relationship between the usability and the user experience goals. Usability goals are more precise and clear whereas user experience goals are less.
EXAMPLES:
A popular example of Interactive Design is the site facebook. facebook is an ever changing environment where users share photos, chat, become friends, send gifts etc. The space is designed so that the more friends you have the more interesting and exciting the experience is and the higher the level of interactivity. facebook is designed to behave so that a user that signs up and has friends is urged to interact notifying users via email of anything that has happened on their site. Other examples of Interactive Design include sites such as vUWS for the University of Western Sydney, Flicker, Youtube, Google, etc.
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