Seattle has changed for me since I was learning principles and practice of interactivity design pillars in MCDM program at the University of Washington. My look at things around me became more deep and maybe more harmonious.
The small signs, handles, tubes, stairs that I was taking for granted started to tell me story about their creators, users, producers. They all have personality and even small features do matter.
I’ve learned a lot in interactive design. Designing process is constant and has many iterations. It’s always beta. The successful design is synonymous of simplicity. Simplicity makes designed product democratic.
In modern digital age, the importance of well designed and aesthetically attractive products is growing as Internet dramatically amplifies competition. Though there are a lot of different approaches to design it’s important to follow main principles.
Interactive design should be user-centered that means careful consideration of your audience, technological constraints, cultural context, and a message, which you want to sent. For instance, Google focuses on search, Ebay – on diversity and variety of choices, Facebook – on friends.
The interesting case that demonstrates how good designed idea can facilitate new conversation has happened with me when I was trying to propose the design strategy for mobile app of UW libraries. The blog post with my proposal has attracted attention of a designer from UW libraries and provided opportunity for creative collaboration. The discussion that we had was very inspiring and helpful for both of us in relation to discovering small but important features for the future mobile app.
Another practical example that helped to uncover various nuances of interactive design is infographics about social media and Egypt revolution. The historical event had provided a lot of food for communication through social media but not much statistics and data were available. The lack of information made me become more creative and invent Twitter ‘mushroom’ – a 3D object describing exponential growth of tweets during the revolution. I understood how important to have appropriate design strategy to create infographics. I wanted to demonstrate data through emotional lenses and show not only figures but dynamic as well. Trying to design for the sake of design didn’t work. Only through thoughtful process of understanding an audience, a process, visual perception, the actual creation of infographics in Adobe Photoshop has become possible. Colors, typography and composition are extremely flexible and can be used to enrich your message or distort it. It is important to try to simplify your design so potential users can focus on message.
Why design is not an art? It has laws. The main law is that people percept the world and things around them through mental models. Mental models are framing every design and every designer. The good designer sees mental models as channels to create good product and not as limits created by human nature.
The matching mental models with your own creativity makes you powerful.
