The art of interactive design

What Hacker News says

1. unaloneApr 2009
   A few things that helped me when I was first getting started:

   -Join every web site you can. If there's an interface to use, use it. Social networks, social news, blogging platforms, commerce apps... everything.

   -If you don't have a good memory, take notes. Write down the things that stand out to you, even if it's not optimal. Write down the things that are so optimal they stand out. Mark down user interface, design choices. Look at how sites do things. Look at how they handle images and typography and white space.

   -As you do that, read things like Smashing Magazine and A List Apart. The most important thing is for you to learn to disagree with stuff you read if you think it's wrong. Sometimes you'll disagree with good advice, and in learning why they're giving that advice you'll learn even more. Sometimes you'll agree with something but other people will disagree, and you'll learn from them.

   It takes a long time to integrate what you've learned rather than to make impulsive decisions based on the last things you've seen. That said, there's nothing to stop you from submitting ideas here or to IRC or emailing people for advice, and iterating.

   Going based on the terms that you specified yourself:

   Clean you get by removing the stuff that doesn't matter. Pare down your features to the bare essentials. If you still have a lot, the challenge is making it so that that lot doesn't seem like much to the end user. If something isn't instantly understandable to somebody that wants it, it can be come better.

   Fast is partly a matter of code. In terms of fast interface, clean helps a lot. Big helps, too, but big is relative. (If you only have one button, make it huge. If you have a hundred of them, fast means making it as obvious as possible where the user wants to go.)

   Beautiful is the hardest. The one thing that can be said about beautiful is that once you have it, you'll know, and with any luck it'll excite you and make you want to skip around a room. Then, if you look at it a week later and still want to skip, you've got a keeper. (It helps if it makes other people skippers too.)

   I don't know about a specific book. Chris Crawford's The Art of Interactive Design is pretty good, but it's expensive. Tufte is great for any sort of related subject, even if he doesn't focus too much on aesthetic.

   Here are a few things that've inspired me. Facebook: look at how much they pack into such a compact interface, and how they vary the look of their pages. Tumblr: it's getting worse every year, but the registration experience is pretty amazing, and most of the default blog themes are great instances if you've never seen Tumblr's blog themes before. Both Flickr and Hunch.com - Hunch is one of the most beautiful new sites I've ever seen; the attention to detail is incredible. Hacker News, if you want an instance of how not to waste an inch of space. Last.fm. It's cliched to say 37signals, but 37signals and all their apps. The sites of indie Mac developers very often - I was stunned the first time I saw culturedcode.com, literally* stunned.

   Just get into as much as possible and learn what stuff you fall in love with. The fastest shortcut to becoming a great designer is to fall in love hard and fast.

   *I MEAN literally, as in: I stared blankly at the screen for a handful of seconds and found it hard to breathe. Yes, I know this is an overreaction, but it happened and I've got no reason to be honest about it.

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2. tomparkJul 2025
   Chris Crawford's tools for interactive storytelling may have failed, but he was a huge inspiration for me in my game dev career, and I still harbor aspirations in "interactive storytelling" due to his influence.

   I first attended CGDC in 1994. It was two years after his Dragon Speech (which I knew nothing about), but the highlight of the conference was his talk about the challenges of story-based games. The part I remember is how he modeled stories as branching trees with fan-out, foldback, tree-of-death, etc (he covers this in the "Architecture" chapter of this book "The Art of Interactive Design"). I didn't really follow Crawford's work on Erasmatron or later, but by the late 90's it sounded like his story model had changed from a tree to a graph network structure, like a finite state machine. While it was an improvement, I was a bit skeptical that this model was enough. Nevertheless, I spent a lot of time thinking about the problem. You see, he'd already infected me with his dream of interactive storytelling.

   By the time I moved to California and took a job at EA/Maxis on The Sims 2.0 team, I had decided that true interactive storytelling (as I saw it) was not possible until game AI was sophisticated enough to enable autonomous NPC chatbots. So I put that dream aside while I pursued a career in software development.

   Here we are, over a quarter of a century later, and that AI technology is here now. For those of us who have been waiting for this moment, it is almost miraculous. It might be the end of an era for Chris Crawford, but it is just the beginning of the AI-based interactive storytelling era.

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3. DonHopkinsApr 2020
   Bret Vector's classic paper "Magic Ink: Information Software and the Graphical Interface" boldly states: "Interactivity considered harmful"!

   When I first read that, I was flabbergasted and offended, because I love interactivity. But he's right.

   "Interaction should be used judiciously and sparingly, only when the environment and history provide insufficient context to construct an acceptable graphic." -Bret Victor, Magic Ink

   This is a critically important lesson to apply to automotive user interfaces. It's much safer if, as much as possible, instead of being interactive, the user interface predicts and infers from context and history what the user wants, when or before they want it, and presents it to them without them asking, so it's there when they need it.

   http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/

   Interactivity considered harmful

   Chris Crawford defines interaction as a three-phase reciprocal process, isomorphic to a conversation: an interactant listens to her partner, thinks about what was said, and speaks a response. Her partner then does the same. See Crawford’s book The Art of Interactive Design (2003), or his essay Fundamentals of Interactivity (1993). For manipulation software, interaction is perfectly suitable: the user views a visual representation of the model, considers what to manipulate next, and performs a manipulation. The software, in turn, inputs the user’s manipulation request, updates the model, and displays the updated representation. With good feedback and an effective means of “speaking” to the software, this process can cycle smoothly and rapidly. It mimics the experience of working with a physical tool.

   Information software, by contrast, mimics the experience of reading, not working. It is used for achieving an understanding—constructing a model within the mind. Thus, the user must listen to the software and think about what it says… but any manipulation happens mentally. Except possibly for signaling a decision, such as clicking a “buy” button, but that concludes, not constitutes, a session. The only reason to complete the full interaction cycle and speak is to explicitly provide some context that the software can’t otherwise infer—that is, to indicate a relevant subset of information. For information software, all interaction is essentially navigation around a data space.

   For example, Amazon’s data space consists of their catalog of items. For a yellow pages directory, the data space contains all business listings; for a movie guide, all showtimes and movie information; for a flight planner, trips to and from all airports. In all of these cases, every interaction, every click and keystroke, search term and menu selection, simply serves to adjust the user’s view into the data space. This is simply navigation.

   Alan Cooper defines excise in this context as a cognitive or physical penalty for using a tool—effort demanded by the tool that is not directly in pursuit of a goal. For example, filling a gas tank is done to support the car, not the goal of arriving at a destination. Cooper goes on to assert that software navigation is nothing but excise:

   …the most important thing to realize about navigation is that, in almost all cases, it represents pure excise, or something close to it. Except in games where the goal is to navigate successfully through a maze of obstacles, navigation through software does not meet user goals, needs, or desires. Unnecessary or difficult navigation thus becomes a major frustration to users. In fact, it is the authors’ opinion that poorly designed navigation presents the number-one problem in the design of any software application or system… Alan Cooper and Robert Reimann, About Face (2003), p143.

   If all interaction is navigation, and navigation is the number-one software problem, interactivity is looking pretty bad already. However, when compared with the other two sources of context, interactivity has even worse problems than simply being a frustrating waste of time:

   The user has to already know what she wants in order to ask for it. Software that infers from history and the environment can proactively offer potentially relevant information that the user wouldn’t otherwise know to ask for. Purely interactive software forces the user to make the first move.

   The user has to know how to ask. That is, she must learn to manipulate a machine. Donald Norman’s concept of determining a user’s “mental model” has become widespread in the software usability community, and is now considered a core design challenge. See Donald Norman’s book The Design of Everyday Things (2002), p9. However, Norman described this concept in the context of mechanical devices. It only applies to software if the software actually contains hidden mechanisms that the user must model. A low-interaction, non-mechanical information graphic relieves both user and designer from struggling with mental models.

   Navigation implies state. Software that can be navigated is software in which the user can get lost. The more navigation, the more corners to get stuck in. The more manipulable state, the more ways to wander into a “bad mode.” State is the primary reason people fear computers—stateful things can be broken. The only state kept by a book is which page it is open to, which is why “getting lost in a book” describes a pleasurable experience!

   Beyond these cognitive problems are physical disadvantages of interaction. The hand is much slower than the eye. Licklider described spending hours plotting graphs and seconds understanding them. A user who must manually request information is in a similar situation—given the mismatch between mousing and reading speeds, most of her time may be spent navigating, not learning. Further, the user might prefer to learn information while using her hands for other purposes, such as writing or eating or stroking a cat. Each time software demands the user’s hands, this activity must be interrupted. Finally, the growing prevalence of computer-related repetitive stress injuries suggests that indiscriminate interactivity may be considerably harmful in a literal, physical sense.

   Unless it is enjoyable or educational in and of itself, interaction is an essentially negative aspect of information software. There is a net positive benefit if it significantly expands the range of questions the user can ask, or improves the ease of locating answers, but there may be other roads to that benefit. As suggested by the above redesigns of the train timetable, bookstore, and movie listings, many questions can be answered simply through clever, information-rich graphic design. Interaction should be used judiciously and sparingly, only when the environment and history provide insufficient context to construct an acceptable graphic.

   It is unfortunate that the communities concerned with human factors of electronic artifacts have latched onto the term “interaction.” Most professional communities and academic programs use the term Human-Computer Interaction, or HCI; the ACM special-interest group is CHI, the converse. Many practitioners, following Cooper and Bill Moggridge, refer to their profession as “interaction design.” For information software, the real issue is context-sensitivity. Interaction is merely one means of achieving that. And as long as “speaking” is constrained to awkwardly pushing metaphors with a mouse, interaction should be the last resort.

   The working designer might protest that interaction is unavoidable in practice, and may even consider my ideal of interaction-free software to be a scoff-worthy fantasy. This is only because the alternatives have been unrecognized and underdeveloped. I believe that with the invention of new context-sensitive graphical forms and research into obtaining and using environment and history, the clicking and dragging that characterizes modern information retrieval will be made to seem laughably archaic. But every condonation of “interactivity,” from the annals of academia to the corporate buzzvocabulary, postpones this future.

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