By: Derek Sgandurra – Bayshore Solutions Design Team

Designing for Interaction

Visual design is a discipline that dates back thousands of years. It is one of the oldest human practices, one whose evidence can be seen on everything from cave walls to Egyptian hieroglyphics and Viking ships. Even in its modern form, graphic design has been used to dress up and present information long before the advent of colonial printing presses, let alone desktop computers. But it wasn’t until the evolution of computers and full-color displays that graphic design branched off into a completely new area, previously unexplored by designers: interactive design.

More commonly referred to as web and software design, interactive design has one aspect unique to all other branches of graphic design, and that is the interaction itself. Only in the past 30 years has software and display technology allowed us to directly engage such things as hyperlinks and navigation menus. By a vast timeline comparison, 30 years is a mere flash against the thousands of years humans have been practicing. As such, the practice of web design is still very much in an adolescent phase. Its advancement is closely tied to many rapidly fluctuating technologies. Processors and graphics cards, bandwidth, displays and touch-screens, software and programming languages: all of these and more contribute to the options and considerations faced by interactive designers.
The ability to engage content—and not just read it—opens up new possibilities and approaches regarding its presentation. As websites become larger in their physical dimensions and deeper in their content, navigation becomes more important and complex. Information architecture is just one of the many sub-disciplines that web designers must embrace. This involves the constructing, categorizing and accenting of content based on similarities and importance. Traditional fields long studied under the umbrella of graphic or commercial design—such as color, composition, and typography—are important components of good interactive design. But adding to the complexity of designing for interaction are the options that such interaction affords us. For instance, unlike on paper, screen text can be enlarged for enhanced legibility. This is a common consideration that must be made in advance of a website’s layout to ensure that increasing the font size will not destroy other aspects of the design. Other examples include audio accessibility, varying screen resolutions and bandwidth speeds, and a growing list of Internet browsers which all render websites a little bit differently.

With little precedence to draw upon, where can web designers turn for inspiration? While other websites are an obvious choice, there are now other branches of interactive design that can provide great ideas. In today’s modern marketplace of high-definition discs and large-screen smart phones, there is no shortage of interface designs to observe. Interfaces are everywhere; at banks and airports, in video games and vending machines, across nations, languages and divides all over the world. More and more each day, web designers are presented with an ever-increasing gallery of work to study. In addition, there are tremendous design resources available in everyday items. Appliances, stereos, hardware, automotive; these items may not be interactive in the strictest digital sense, but they are products born from decades of expert design evolution. Often times even the most traditional application of design intuition can lend solid theories and inspiration for new media.

And at least one thing is certain: interactive design has only begun to take root in our society. As screens get bigger, thinner, more flexible and less power-consumptive, interfaces will continue to infiltrate nearly every facet of our daily lives. All of these interfaces will require careful design considerations and sensitivity, particularly when touch-screen and multi-sensory interfaces begin to mature and flourish. As our venues of business and entertainment converge, as television and Internet channels compete for our attention, and as mobility fast becomes the standard instead of the exception, design innovation will persist in demanding more from our interfaces, and their creators.