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May 31, 1996
In the Spring of 1995, a new design competition was announced
by interactions
magazine. The call
for entries stated:
The practice of interaction design has moved quickly to the
foreground in the software field. And, as more and more things
in the world become interactive, interaction design is becoming
an important aspect in many other fields. Despite all this growth,
we are all just beginning to learn how to do this. Designing
interactive experiences is so danged hard that all of us in the
field have a need to learn from the successes of others.
To help this learning process along, the Association for Computing
Machinery (ACM), through interactions, its quarterly magazine
on design, is developing an annual recognition program for people
who design interactive products. This peer-recognition program
will set a high standard for the industry, not only recognizing
achievement but encouraging designers and companies to reach
for quality. The criteria for judging, the credentials of the
jurors, and the nature of the award process will combine to make
the interactions award a prestigious program.
The interactions award is modeled on programs sponsored by
publishers in other design-oriented fields, such as Communication
Arts' Design Annuals and the IDEA awards for industrial design....
This isn't an award for good looks or clever innovations.
We aren't going to recognize the fanciest new widget. We aren't
looking for the best-selling, the most adrenaline-inducing, or
the best use of video. Not that these things are bad--we like
an adrenaline-inducing multimedia best-seller with clever widgets
as much as the next techno-sapien. But when it comes to awards,
we care about quality of interaction. We want to recognize products,
services, and environments that enhance people's lives. We're
looking for designs that effectively help people work, learn,
live, play or communicate.
The results of the competion were presented in the May+June,
1996 issue of interactions. They were the product of a
review process that was deeply concerned with figuring out what
criteria should be applied to interaction design, as well as
judging the individual entrants. The primary issue was Quality
of experience Taken together, the criteria raise one key
question: How does effective interaction design provide people
with a successful and satisfying experience?
The detailed criteria that evolved were:
- Needed
- Understanding of users
- Learnable, Usable
- Appropriate
- Effective design process
- Aesthetic experience
- Manageable
- Mutable
These are described more fully in the magazine (excerpted
on-line here).
We will show a video that was made about the review process,
then have comments and discussion by three of the people who
participated. The focus will be on our struggle to define what
is meant by "quality" in interaction design, and on
examples from the competition that illustrate the best features
of interactive hardware and software.
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Lauralee Alben is a principal of Alben+Faris Inc., a firm
specializing in graphic and interaction design for multimedia,
software applications, the world-wide web and emerging technologies.
Their clients include Apple Computer, Netscape, Berkeley Systems,
GAP and IBM. Alben+Faris has contributed design to a wide range
of interactive products, including interfaces for operating systems
and authoring tools, specialized devices, software applications,
CD-ROM multimedia titles and web sites. A familiar brand identity
that Alben+Faris designed is Apple Computer's Mac OS. Alben has
recently created a strategic design plan for the creation of
new appearances for the Mac OS, a part of Apple's upcoming Copland
release. A teacher as well as a practicing designer and writer,
Alben has lectured internationally at many professional conferences,
schools and universities. Her design work has been shown at SIGGRAPH
and CHI and in design and computer publications including interactions,
Communication Arts, International Design and HOW.
Harry Saddler has been creating software for users since 1977,
when he attempted to create an inventory control program for
an Apple 1 computer with 8k of memory. His appreciation for simplicity
and economy thus assured, his perspective on users and software
usability was honed by writing and testing data-entry programs
in the same room as the data-entry operators. Since the release
of the Macintosh in 1984, Harry has designed such diverse Macintosh
products as small-business accounting software, educational administration
packages, an emergency-room chart-writing system, an image cataloging
system, interactive tutorials, self-paced training, an electronic
newspaper, an electronic game show, multimedia information systems,
interactive technical documents and many others. Harry is currently
a designer and strategist in Apple's User Experience Architect's
office, where his roles include mangement of the Apple Design
Project, working with interdisciplinary student design teams.
Terry Winograd
is Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University,
where he directs the Project
on People, Computers, and Design , and the teaching and research
program on Human-Computer
Interaction Design . He is one of the principal investigators
in the Stanford Digital Libraries Initative, and has written
a number of books on artificial intelligence and human-computer
interaction (including Understanding Computers and Cognition:
A New Foundation for Design (Addison-Wesley, 1987, co-authored
with Fernando Flores), and (co-edited with Paul Adler), Usability:
Turning Technologies into Tools (Oxford, 1992). His most
recent book, Bringing
Design to Software (Addison-Wesley, 1996) brings together
the perspectives of a number of leading proponents of software
design.
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