Product Behavior

Icons and instructional graphics are a language. Without knowing enough about the grammar to communicate properly, the message won’t get across. Part of the goal of the designer is to reduce the number of types of interactions the user must learn. To do this, the designer looks across the complete set of interactions in order to develop a small set that can handle all of them.

A tool that I end up using on nearly every project is the “Conversation Map.” I wrote a while ago about treating product interactions as conversations, and this is one of the simple-yet-key ways I use to make sure the interaction make sense and follows the conversational rules we all expect.

Here’s a simple example: what does the interaction between a vending machine and a customer look like? I put together a quick conversation map…

Many products communicate like apes do: they tell me what to do next. Better to treat me like a person: give me the information I need to understand the job at hand and participate in getting it done.

A fair amount of the work I do involves the design of “user interface.” I don’t know who coined that term, but it’s interesting. I’m sure it was a software engineer, who divided his or her work into “writing the code that actually does stuff” and “writing the code that lets the user interface with the code that actually does stuff.” It’s a term with product-orientation–if we were consumer oriented, we’d call it the “product interface.”