Content is King No More: Web 2.0 Is About Interaction
An interesting take on Web 2.0 and the role of Interaction Design ...
"We hear a lot about the basics of Web 2.0: how it is about user control of content. Or about websites that behave more like thick client applications. Or about web products that are designed to facilitate network effects and serve as a co-collaborative space between the product’s provider and the user community. But we haven’t talked enough about the larger implications of these things, and how this affects the structure and importance of design teams and approaches. In short, what it means to people like us. While a lot can be written on this, the thing that is most glaring and poignant to me is the seismic shift in importance from a focus on content and information to behavior and interaction.
Interaction design (IxD) stretches well beyond the design of digital interfaces. Indeed, the discipline shares more in common with industrial design than it does IA. It is about behavior, about how people actually interact with a product. With traditional websites, this was an (relatively) unimportant challenge. Unlike desktop applications that demanded rich and deep interaction models, the awkward and limited nature of websites based on technologies like HTML and Flash were alternately either very bland and limited, or very clunky and heavy to use. Interaction design, while certainly a component in the process, was less important than IA in particular. After all, the fundamental issue was one of content management: organizations with no experience in gathering all of their content together and organizing it and making it available for successful use were stuck in a quagmire of figuring out how to best achieve that. It was often the product of multiple redesigns to actually get it right. So not only was the technology too limited to enable rich interactions, the business needs were far more elementary than that. We rarely even got into more serious and complex interaction problems.
Today, it’s different. We have increasingly rich web interfaces, and organizations are relatively far along in achieving workable solutions to their content/information level problems. The essential problem of today is the behavior, the interaction: how do we leverage the available technologies and create truly remarkable web interfaces and applications. Because now we can. Now we have the ability to dramatically upgrade the state and nature of the web, and much of that opportunity lies in the interaction layer of the interface design." continued ... (Via knemeyer.com)
"We hear a lot about the basics of Web 2.0: how it is about user control of content. Or about websites that behave more like thick client applications. Or about web products that are designed to facilitate network effects and serve as a co-collaborative space between the product’s provider and the user community. But we haven’t talked enough about the larger implications of these things, and how this affects the structure and importance of design teams and approaches. In short, what it means to people like us. While a lot can be written on this, the thing that is most glaring and poignant to me is the seismic shift in importance from a focus on content and information to behavior and interaction.
Interaction design (IxD) stretches well beyond the design of digital interfaces. Indeed, the discipline shares more in common with industrial design than it does IA. It is about behavior, about how people actually interact with a product. With traditional websites, this was an (relatively) unimportant challenge. Unlike desktop applications that demanded rich and deep interaction models, the awkward and limited nature of websites based on technologies like HTML and Flash were alternately either very bland and limited, or very clunky and heavy to use. Interaction design, while certainly a component in the process, was less important than IA in particular. After all, the fundamental issue was one of content management: organizations with no experience in gathering all of their content together and organizing it and making it available for successful use were stuck in a quagmire of figuring out how to best achieve that. It was often the product of multiple redesigns to actually get it right. So not only was the technology too limited to enable rich interactions, the business needs were far more elementary than that. We rarely even got into more serious and complex interaction problems.
Today, it’s different. We have increasingly rich web interfaces, and organizations are relatively far along in achieving workable solutions to their content/information level problems. The essential problem of today is the behavior, the interaction: how do we leverage the available technologies and create truly remarkable web interfaces and applications. Because now we can. Now we have the ability to dramatically upgrade the state and nature of the web, and much of that opportunity lies in the interaction layer of the interface design." continued ... (Via knemeyer.com)
Role of Interaction Design.
1 Comments:
His guides can make a webpage better, but if you pay people to make webpages and they make all these design mistakes, it is probably your web designers who are over paid. Anyway getting a hold of those 113 design points and doing a quick run trough can't hurt, but it is not brain science.
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