October 29th, 2024
Most people think of definitions in terms of their logical perfection. Does the definition of a word include everything to which the word applies, and does it exclude everything to which the word does not apply? This is all well and good if you are a lexicographer. But for situations like this, the true value of the definition of interactivity lies in how it teaches you to create good interactive products. Let’s start with this image:
The steps on the left are those taken by your user. You cannot control how the user will carry out their part of the interaction. As the designer, you control steps 4, 5, and 6. Those are your responsibility, and the quality of your work depends on how well you implement each of those steps.
The great majority of software designers do not understand an absolutely crucial truth about these steps. Here’s how to understand the nature of the blunder. We are using the conversation as the model for interaction. Let’s consider the factors that affect the quality of the conversation. Let’s start with step 4: listening. Have you ever conversed with somebody who paid close attention to what you were saying? Have you ever had a conversation with somebody who refused to listen to what you are actually saying?
You’re trying hard to clear up a misconception, but they just won’t heed what you’re saying, and all your efforts are for naught. When you try to converse with somebody who listens poorly, you are wasting your time.
OK, let’s consider step 5: thinking. I’m sure that you’ve had conservations with brilliant people that were exhilarating. But you’ve also had conversations with people who were just too stupid to understand your points.
Weren’t those conversations frustrating? Looking back on them, do you realize that you should have walked away at the first idiotic statement from the other person?
Now let’s consider step 6: speaking. Can you recall conversations with highly articulate people who could express themselves clearly and powerfully? Those were great conversations, weren’t they? You really learned a lot from them, didn’t you? On the other hand, I’m sure that you have endured murky conversations with people who just couldn’t put two words together to save their life.
Those conversations with inarticulate people were so frustrating, weren’t they? You spent most of your time trying to eke out some kind of meaning from their comments, and mostly failed. Right?
Let’s draw a conclusion from these three examples. In order to have a worthwhile conversation, your interlocutor must listen well AND must think well AND must speak well. A conversationalist who excels in one of the three tasks but fails in another task is still an overall failure. This applies to every interaction, including software.
A common design/development mistake is to tackle the easiest part of a project first, in the hope of getting some momentum before tackling the hard parts. Wrong, wrong, wrong! I always tackle the hardest part first, because that’s the part that will make or break the project. If you can’t solve the toughest problem, the project is a failure and there’s no point in investing more effort in it. If you have already invested time and effort in the easy parts of the project, they will all end up as wasted effort.
This mistake manifests as an initial concentration on the speaking part of the design, because we understand the visual better than we understand the listening and thinking parts. Here’s how the balance between the three components of the design should look:
This is what most designs, especially games, look like:
The designer puts most of their effort into the one area they know best: the speaking part. After all, most designers have a background in conventional media (graphics, animation, writing, etc), so they lean toward the speaking part of the interactivity, paying less attention to the listening and thinking components. But those are the parts that differentiate computer software from every other medium! Giving short shrift to them is like making French cuisine without working much on the sauces, or composing rap music without any work on the lyrics, or painting portraits without much concern for subject’s facial expression. Many software designers are well-caricatured in this classic cartoon by Jules Feiffer:
Treating your user this way is not good software design.
The moral of this story: Your software must listen well and think well, too.