The synopsis of The Inmates are Running the Asylum says, “Think about your phone, cameras, cars – everything – being…programmed by people who in their rush to accept the…benefits of the silicon chip, have abdicated their responsibility to make these products easy to use.” (Cooper, Synopsis) High tech interaction, which is intertwined into every facet of our daily lives, is poor. The reason for this, according to author Alan Cooper, is programmers are self-referentially designing the interaction of software from the backseat. The result is hard to use systems or “cognitive friction”. Interaction design (ID) is Cooper’s answer to this friction. The discipline of designing goal-directed software for specific users, ID should be well-incorporated into the development process. It must be the sole measure of quality control of software. This makes users happy, unifies software development organizations, and thus betters the entire high tech industry.
The World Wide Web is now a major platform for software, and thus another area where ID can make or break us. With the explosion of Web 2.0, companies and individuals are tapping into the potential of turning the Web from a collection of pages, to a collection of applications. There is high potential for “cognitive friction”, and Cooper’s ideas are becoming as relevant to the web today as they were to desktop software when he wrote his bestseller. We already know this as web developers. Link relevance & well-designed navigation is our bread and butter. And we can’t deny the interaction design success of applications such as Google Maps. On the web, ID is not only relevant, it should be a central pillar of web development.
Unfortunately, I have hitherto been what Cooper calls an “apologist”: a high-tech defender who views the complexity of software as a challenge and not a failing. Due to my academic background in programming, I have designed desktop and web applications self-referentially, thinking of my own pleasure using the software. Being a logical programmer, I design in an “implementation model.” I give the user software that behaves like the internals of a computer, rational and impolite. I have, however, since reading Cooper’s book become enlightened to ID, and hope other web developers will as well.