Demystifying Interaction Design

Joshua Porter expands on behavior is our medium - Robert Fabricant's keynote at Interaction 09.

We design to change, guide, support, elicit, constrict, and control behavior. The products and screens we create are about getting others to do something, using or buying or donating or otherwise taking some real-world action. Good design elicits the right behavior, poor design does not.

Robert Fabricant - Behavior is our Medium from Interaction Design Association on Vimeo.

An interesting discussion occurs in the comments about the words "elicit" and "behavior". There is a large focus on the moral implications of changing a person's behavior but that was not the point of saying behavior is our medium. It's also about changing the behavior of a system to match the user's goals, needs, wants, etc. to create successful interactions.

Surprisingly, Robert’s assertion was not as obvious to all those in attendance as he had hoped. He got pushback on the idea that designers traffic in behavior. In a follow-up post he writes:

“There is universal acceptance of a holistic approach to human centered design within this community – generally referred to as ‘experience design’ (not my preferred term). This approach considers all of the contexts surrounding use and then tries to build a unified interaction model to support user needs over time, across these contexts. It focuses not just on expressed needs but on those that are unexpressed: the emotions, motivations, and desires that shape user engagement over time. In fact, more and more of our clients are looking for our help in identifying these latent, unmet needs. So, it is interesting to find designers who are very comfortable, in fact insistent, on this holistic approach and yet spooked by the idea that we are in the ‘behavior business’.”

While I largely agree that I work with behavior, I don't feel this fully "demystifies" what I do as you could say the same about many professions - marketing and advertising come to mind immediately. But I do like using the word behavior in terms of what I'm shaping, more so than pixels, because it gets more to the heart of what an interaction designer does. And this is why I don't use the term "interface designer" as it puts too much emphasis on the screen and the visual and that's the easiest aspect to describe what I do.