There’s an elephant in the room. I’m going to call it out, we have wicked problems in the interaction design field. A discipline that was birthed to cultivate innovation in user experience is stuck in it’s post modern ways. Want to fix it? Stop using esoteric buzz words and designing with hot keyed boxes and arrows. At this rate we ought to change the name from Interaction Design to Interaction Engineering.

My observation: The two constantly reoccurring themes at interaction conferences:
1. We’re not respected in the process
2. How amazing Apple interaction design is

Here’s the skinny. We’re not respected because the majority of us aren’t churning out “good” design. We’re utilizing an antiquated poetry to describe a new poetic era. But beyond this, we are failing to really capture our fleeting potential. I too hate the word “potential” but I’m going to use it because really it’s an untapped resource in this field. It’s as if we’re focusing on how cool the words look on a page of a book and not the actual content of the story.

Interaction design is not about usability. There I said it, I’ll say it again… Interaction design is not about usability. I dare you to put that on a t-shirt and romp around your next attendence at CHI or IXDA. ID is about something so much cooler, essence.

Essence is an important thing because it’s something that so many fields dance around. It’s generic I know… how scary! We are the true masters and commanders because we really get it. When a project manager comes to you and says that they want the product to have a timeline with cute arrows and whizzing laser beams the first thing that you should think is: “what are you really trying to do?” In fact, don’t only think it. Be bold, go right out and ask them the question.

That’s the beauty of interaction design because that’s what we do we ask “why”. Why should it take up twenty screens and not one? Why should it be purple and not blue? Why should we have the user click thirty times and not 5? Why should there even be a timeline instead of a graph?

Let me try it from another approach. We the interaction field are story tellers. We aren’t facilitators of story, we are actually the ones telling it. When you are brought onto a brief your compatriots are simply trying to describe to you the kind of story that they want to tell (Romance, Horror, Action, etc). You the interaction designer are tasked with figuring out what characters you need, what their individual story arcs are, where and when they will appear in said story and even when they die (go on vacation).

Baffling I know. Characters don’t have to be people, look at little red riding hood. You can have a feisty wolf if that fits your fancy. Stop making Jerry Bruckheimer productions. Good design is not formulaic. If you want A + B = C go into mathematics.

Let’s take a closer look at one of my favorite films “The Dark Knight”. It’s got action, it’s got drama, you learn to love the characters and at the same time you don’t notice that they are frolicking about in their pajamas. Why did it take thirty years for someone to write a villain as good as Darth Vader? This is interaction design at it’s finest. People interfacing with a screen in a very controlled environment (the theater) is no different than sitting at home operating your website. The parallel I am trying to make is that as designers we need to look towards our comrades, in separate but like disciplines, for inspiration. Stop boiling yourself down to boxes and arrows.

Ease your death grip on your tools. I know that you need to be able to bill for something at the end of the day - how about “good design”? Throw a little chaos into the frey. Ask yourself every time you start to open that second page in indesign if you really need it or if you can tell your story with two less characters this time. Maybe you don’t even need indesign. Try to do it in a collage or finger painting.

Lastly, let me mention a note about the second common theme of interaction conferences. Apple does not do usability testing. Ask yourself what that really entails the next time you find yourself standing in a dark room facing a one way mirror. The tools are not what make their products great, it’s the thinking.

I was brought up in school with the notion that Interaction Design would save the world. I still want to believe. We were lucky to study a discipline that was predicated on the foundation that good design starts with asking “why”. Make no mistake that this is unique to our field. Philippe Starck, Christopher Nolan, and even Steve Jobs are all natural interaction designers. The only difference is that their penchant for why does not stop at the tools that they use to tell their stories.