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Panelists:Gitta Salomon, Swim Interaction Design Studio, gitta@swimstudio.com
Chris Edwards, Art Technology Group, chris@atg.com
Héctor Moll-Carrillo, IDEO Product Development, hector@ideo.com
Kevin Mullet, Macromedia, mullet@macromedia.com
Laura Teodosio, Art Technology Group, teo@atg.com
How can interaction designers ensure that their work makes its way into the final implementation of a product? The language, tools and techniques for communicating design ideas within the interactive product development domain are currently emerging. This panel provides insight into promising approaches by examining the ways in which several practitioners have succeeded, and failed, at transferring their design ideas to current products.
technology transfer, design, interaction design, product development, user interface, software development
© 1997 Copyright on this material is held by the authors.
Today's interactive product development teams often consist of certain individuals who design the end user experience and other individuals who are charged with implementing that user experience. As the diversity of interactive products grows - ranging from dedicated hardware products, to desktop application software, to web-based interactive environments - and the makeup of product development teams shifts from solely internal teams to teams composed of internal and external resources, new ways to communicate the desired end user experience between designer and implementor are emerging. As with communication of design ideas in other fields (e.g., graphic designer to printer, industrial designer to mechanical engineer, architect to construction crew) the ultimate success of the end product rests on establishing a common language. In the still immature and often complex realm of interactive products - where teams consist of individuals with widely divergent backgrounds - this language is currently being created.
This panel will provide insight into tools and techniques recently used by practitioners to communicate their interaction designs. Each panelist represents a different domain and product development environment; through comparing and contrasting the varying approaches, the panel will provide new ways for practitioners to think about the transfer of their design ideas to product.
Gitta Salomon is an interaction designer and founder of the interaction design consultancy Swim.
One year ago, while at IDEO, I became the interaction designer on a voice messaging product. The IDEO team was also responsible for the product's industrial design, mechanical engineering and software implementation; the client team supplied marketing and core technology. After creating numerous interaction design simulations to arrive at a usable product that met (changing) physical constraints, the lead programmer asked me to construct a state transition table in Excel describing my design. In a short time, I specified over 250 states the product could assume; the table clearly described each state that would result from depressing any of the devices' 10 buttons. The programmer converted the table into a C structure, plugged it into his program, and for the first time, I saw interactions I had designed directly translated into a working product.
Unfortunately, not all interfaces can be defined in such a straightforward manner. In this panel, I will facilitate discussion regarding the range of artifacts that can be used to communicate interaction designs to product teams.
Héctor Moll-Carrillo is an interaction designer at IDEO Product Development, a product development consultancy.
The product I will discuss is the Smith Corona LS 42 Label Printer - a small tabletop or handheld personal label printer. It has full alphanumeric capabilities for all european languages and offers a choice of text fonts, styles and sizes. It can also store and recall text and print special characters.
The product was jointly developed by two teams, one consisting of marketing, electrical engineering, and firmware (software) personnel at Smith Corona, and an IDEO team composed of an industrial designer, a human factors analyst, mechanical engineers and myself, the interaction designer. My role was to design the look (product graphics, fonts, annunciators) and feel (behavior, the entire state table for firmware) of the Label Printer's functionality.
In communicating the interaction design I used a number of materials. Design sketches and drawings were created to present different keyboard configurations and function key labeling schemes to the marketing team at Smith Corona. Sketches also helped us get quick, informal reactions from people in our studio about functional aspects of the design, such as "What do you think this key does?" or "Which key or combination of keys would you use to initiate this task?" As a final deliverable I created an Interaction and Behavior Specification document which described all possible user interactions, clearly stating the product behavior from the user's point of view; i.e., it described each possible user request and the resulting product response. Writing the specification from the user's point of view allowed all members of the team to share and discuss the same vision of the product experience. This document went through three revisions before the functionality was frozen and implemented. Each revision required multiple signatures from various members of the team before changes were accepted. I also created camera-ready art for product graphics (i.e., the labels applied to the product face and buttons).
Kevin Mullet is a product designer for Macromedia, a software tools development firm.
Macromedia Director 5.0 is a leading multimedia authoring tool, supporting asset management, layout and sequencing, media editing, and scripting. Some people think the product could be easier to use. The Macromedia User Interface (MUI) is a cross-product initiative, supporting the "Studio" strategy, by allowing users to move between applications without being disrupted by gratuitous design changes.
As MUI project lead, I assembled representatives from each product team, as well as documentation, tech support, and marketing. Because the goal was consensus (the initiative would succeed only if all parties agreed to share common designs) we relied heavily on an issue database to resolve differences. A useful strategy was to line up team members on each side of every issue, so that I could propose a coherent set of resolutions in a "non-partisan" manner. After lengthy debate, we produced a specification document outlining general directions in twelve key areas.
On Director 5, I worked closely with a senior architect and a senior multimedia producer to identify critical task bottlenecks, establish feature priorities, and develop effective conceptual and interaction designs, along with a more professional visual presentation. Because Director was to be the "reference implementation" of the MUI, we tried to ensure that critical design decisions would generalize to other "MUI" applications. This sometimes led to resistance by the development team, which wasn't always comfortable with decisions that seemed locally sub-optimal.
As with the MUI, the volume of information in a written specification was often perceived as overwhelming. Interactive prototypes created in Director proved more acceptable. This preference has been confirmed in subsequent MUI development work: people could more easily extract information about the final appearance and behavior from a software simulation than from a written document. An editable, interactive menu simulator was especially helpful. Perhaps most importantly, my subcontractors and I were able to deliver much of the presentation "data" in its final form, either by working directly in a resource editor to produce final icons or dialog layouts or by providing the artwork in a highly structured format that could be processed automatically by software tools.
Chris Edwards is Creative Director and Laura Teodosio is Senior Art Technologist at the Art Technology Group, a company addressing both technology and design for web-based products.
In developing SonyStation, we each fulfill one half of the interaction design role. Then Chris ensures that ideas are implemented and supported graphically, while Laura ensures that interaction concepts are incorporated into the engineering architecture and final working code.
The product we will discuss is the SonyStation, a web-based entertainment, gaming and shopping experience. Because of its size and complexity, the station posed some unique challenges. We were required to design and build a
seamless and cohesive user experience, even though many system pieces would run on machines in different locations. Compounding the problem was that many of these pieces were being created by a dozen different third party developers. And lastly, incompatibilities between interface implementations in various web browsers forced us to reconsider the design countless times.
A series of 5 prototypes was created for this project both to communicate the interaction design and to test feasibility. In temporal order, they were a conceptual hand sketched Director prototype, a series of small Java prototypes to test various navigation and windowing possibilities across web browsers and operating systems, a second Director prototype to convey more detailed functionality and graphic treatment and a final static HTML prototype version to specify layout details. The static HTML prototype also became the basis for the dynamic code that was eventually built.
Parallel to these prototypes a detailed Functional and Behavior Specification was created. However due to the scale of project - over 200 interactive pages - a detailed interaction specification of every page was not feasible to create and maintain. Rather, the document served to capture classes of interaction and was useful to the engineering team in devising a first technical specification.
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