Designing for Interaction: Creating Smart Applications and Clever Devices (Voices That Matter Series) Book

Dan Saffer's book is a thorough yet high-level look at the emerging and evolving practice of Interaction Design. Although each chapter could easily be its own book ' and in most cases, such books exist ' the shallow-yet-broad scope of Designing For Interaction was appealing. Each chapter is sprinkled with interesting interviews with top-notch designers and educators: Hugh Dubberly, Shelley Evenson, Larry Tesler, and more.

With that said, I have two criticisms of this book:

First, in easily 50% of the cases the photos used in the book were completely unnecessary, and only distracted from the content. For example, in the section talking about conducting stakeholder interviews, there's a stock photo of some suit-wearing people interviewing some other suit-wearing people ' a helpful visual cue for people unfamiliar with the word "interview."

Second, I found myself gagging when Saffer described "The Four Approaches to Design" which Saffer believes are:

1) User-centered design
2) Activity-centered design
3) Systems design
4) Genius design

He goes on to describe these at length and I read the entire section with my mouth wide open, shocked at how idiotic and frankly wrong dividing these up into "approaches" actually is. The reality is:

- There is always someone/something using the designed product or service.

- There are always some kind of activities a person does with the designed product or service.

- The product or service always fits within some kind of larger systems, and is composed of smaller systems, no matter how insignificant each may be.

- Some need to design based on intuition ("genius" in Saffer's words) will be a part of any product, even in cases where there is time or money to do extensive research.

ALL of these "approaches to design" are present in EVERY project whether a designer chooses to ignore them or not, and dividing them out into distinct approaches caught me very off guard, and seemed out of step with the rest of Dan Saffer's otherwise excellent book.