In the main, entries to this year’s Interaction Awards were good. The apps, the websites, the interfaces, and the games were slick and sleek. For the most part, they checked the design boxes we have all come to expect. Sure, some seemed to have beamed in from the early days of Netscape, but overall, buttons, pushed, sent you somewhere you thought you might go. Screens, swiped, loaded the information you expected to see.
So far so good, right? After all, isn’t that what we want from our interaction design? That it does what we expect it to do (and then, ideally, that it gets the hell out of our way until we need it again?). Yet, somehow, the main achievement of all of this resolute competence was to confirm the long-held idea: that the very best design--the design that transcends the merely “good”--is way more than skin or screen-deep. As juror Jonas Löwgren, a professor at Malmö University in Sweden, commented, “It feels like interaction design has solidified to become a reliable profession that is to be trusted and relied upon to deliver.” So now what?
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So far so good, right? After all, isn’t that what we want from our interaction design? That it does what we expect it to do (and then, ideally, that it gets the hell out of our way until we need it again?). Yet, somehow, the main achievement of all of this resolute competence was to confirm the long-held idea: that the very best design--the design that transcends the merely “good”--is way more than skin or screen-deep. As juror Jonas Löwgren, a professor at Malmö University in Sweden, commented, “It feels like interaction design has solidified to become a reliable profession that is to be trusted and relied upon to deliver.” So now what?
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