articles

Selling Yourself As an Interaction Designer

By Theresa Wilkinson, W-edge design
With Jennifer Square
Reprinted with permission from the STC Intercom magazine - January 2004 Volume 51 Issue 1.

In my last article, I talked about a somewhat new field in Web design called interaction design. Rather than focusing on how the site looks, interaction designers are primarily concerned with how an application or Web site functions. They investigate whether the application or Web site performs the intended task in a predictable manner. Interaction design incorporates a lot of skills from other disciplines, such as technical writing and information architecture. With the help of my colleague, Jennifer Square, I will discuss the unique areas of interaction design with which technical communicators may not be familiar. Expanding your skills in these areas will help you sell yourself as an interaction designer. We've broken the skills into three categories: people (or soft skills), process, and technology.

People Skills

Selling yourself to a potential employer involves more than assuring them that you've got what it takes. You must connect with them on a personal level, too.

Develop Your Vision

As an interaction designer, you protect the Web site or application’s vision--you must ensure that all work is moving that site toward the intended vision. One way to do that is by getting all team members on board. For instance, a former boss once told me that I have the unique ability to talk about a Web site with so much excitement and enthusiasm that I have everyone in the room as excited as I am. I use this skill to my advantage when I talk about my vision of a Web site or the direction it needs to move in to accomplish the company’s goals.

Build Your Negotiating Skills

As a technical communicator, you may have had some practice being a negotiator, but as an interaction designer in a highly visible project--watch out! To be successful in interaction design, you'll need to work on this area. As Don Norman, a specialist in usability and human-centered design, has pointed out, negotiation is often a multi-legged stool: Each contributor to the discussion--the user; business, marketing, and engineering departments; or management--acts as one leg of the stool. If the weight of the negotiation is not distributed equally, the stool's balance is at risk.

As an interaction designer, you are now the point of contact for many of the questions, debates, and reviews the application elicits. Every person (including leaders and management) experiences the solutions you've created for users. Everything culminates in your lap, and managers will have questions about your approach, users will ask you why they received this functionality and not that one, programmers will debate with you over the right solution, and your business team may ask for things that are not feasible with timelines and project deadlines. You have to consider all of these competing interests and find a solution that still fits users' needs. Keep innovating along the way, but you must negotiate every solution. Interaction designers or usability and design professionals like to say, "I own the user interface," or "What U+D says goes." But in many cases, this approach is not realistic. Every solution is a negotiated solution with the end user in mind.

Process

To sell yourself as an interaction designer, you need to assure your potential employers that you know what you're doing and how your skills will benefit them. The following abilities address the process of interaction design.

Focus on ROI (Return on Investment)

Nothing will sell your new skills faster than saving the company money. As you move into an interaction designer role at your company, look for ways to improve the Web site or application with your new skills. Do your homework and figure out how much money your ideas can make for your company.

For instance, when I proposed redesigning a customer service Web site several years ago, I talked to the customer services representatives myself. I asked them for the top twenty-five questions/complaints they received every day. As I suspected, most of the calls were related to the poor site navigation. So I figured the average cost of a customer representative per hour, based on the average duration of a call and how many calls the customer service department received. I presented the directors of the company with a site redesign that would save them $25,000 per year in customer service calls. Needless to say, I won the contract.

Know the Business Process

As a technical communicator, you may have worried about immediate tasks the user wants to accomplish. As an interaction designer, however, you must also know how those tasks fit into a larger business process. In some cases, to make the user's life easier, it may be necessary to integrate your activity with the activities from other systems to make a seamless user experience. For example, in the customer service Web application I work on now, the user must set up a new billing account. An associated task involves collecting money from the new account owner. That "collect money" part is not necessarily part of our system we're working on, but we'll have to integrate our product with the system that collects money to make the user's experience seamless. Without understanding the full business process, you could miss that important point.

If you have a difficult time understanding the difference between task and business process, many fine books exist to help you out, including JoAnn Hackos's Task Analysis for User Interface Design, or any book by legendary business process guru Michael Hammer.

Understand Usability and Interaction Design Principles

Take as many classes as you can in this area. You may be familiar with a lot of the techniques from being a technical communicator, but specific knowledge helps when talking with usability and design professionals. An interaction designer should not necessarily be worried about graphic design or usability testing as a major career focus, but you should be familiar with the terminology and processes. You may oversee or consult on these activities, but they aren't your primary job focus.

Your job as an interaction designer is to worry about task flow, behavior, and business process and make sure that the user interaction reflects these considerations. Remember that you aren't working directly with the user interface, but that it is a part of the work you are creating. Leave that the nuts and bolts of that element to the graphic designers.

Technology

It isn't necessary for an interaction designer to be a programmer, but you have to understand the underlying systems that you may be working or delivering, as well as the concepts of any new technologies you may be working with. It is also important to understand the differences between creating a Web application versus a Web site.

Currently, I am working on replacing a mainframe user interface with a Web user interface, but I must also understand the capabilities, rules, and processes of that mainframe system. For example, I need to know the rules, how are accounts processed, and how many mainframe screens and tasks exist for users in a mainframe world. This technical knowledge helps me shape a seamless user interaction. However, I have to be careful not to adopt a "mainframe" mentality when developing a Web application. You may need to consult both programmers who are familiar with Web solutions and programmers who have worked in a mainframe environment. That way, each perspective affects the user interaction solution.

You must understand the fundamental differences between creating a Web application versus a Web site that is informational in nature. The usability and design techniques, users and their behavior, and focus of work are different. For example, a company's external site to market their products requires specific skills from the designer, unique technology solutions, and focus on marketing. An internal Web application also has unique needs and user behavior and is also dependent on many complicated back-end systems. My users, for example, are answering customer questions and accomplishing tasks very quickly in a call center. You will need to adjust your processes and philosophies accordingly.

One of the aspects of technical writing that I have always admired is the variety of skills that you can acquire and improve upon while doing your job. Many of these skills will aid you throughout your career, whether you continue in project management, personnel management, or Web development. Just continue to learn, either through classes or books, and these skills will help you in any job you choose.

References

Baxley, Bob. Introducing Interaction Design," Boxes and Arrows.

Heller, David. "Why I'm Not Calling Myself an Information Architect Anymore," Boxes and Arrows.

Marion, Craig. "What is Interaction Design and What Does It Mean to Information Designers?"

Morville, Peter, and Lou Rosenfeld, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly & Associates, 1998.