Contextual Interaction

Just got over with the final concept of my project! Whew!
Came across some interesting insights regarding user experience design… The principal one- as you might have already read in the previous post is that user experience design may not always be limited to ‘user’ experience design. True- in the end deliverable all the entities have to point towards a wholesome and meaningful ‘user’ experience. But the process may differ every time. This is one area where design education often loses out. Now for instance who would have thought there is something called ‘context based interaction design’?
What now on earth is this!!
To put it simply lets take the cell phone example again… Designing an application interface for a cell phone for a user is ‘user experience’ design. But say- I want to design a cell phone application specifically for a guy in New Delhi, India who is a road side vendor (Mind you- some top mobile companies see an awesome potential in this!). My user in this case does not only have his user specific needs (networking/ attracting potential customers/ updating customers on his products/ contacting wholesale dealers etc), but he also is residing in a place which has strong contextual implications. His business also depends on the context that he is placed in. Delhi is unbearably hot in summers and extremely cold in winters. It has a certain culture of people in majority with a certain taste when it comes to making a selection while shopping. They have certain living standards and language which are unique to the region. Here we are not really studying just the user. All this data comes from the context around him- i.e. the environment, the people, the culture- all that is going to have implications on his street vending! A cell phone application which aids him in his vending while catering to these contextual values will prove to be far more useful to him than a simple application based on him and his needs alone.
See my point?

What is Interaction Design?

What really is interaction design? Ranjeet Makkuni once asked me this same question. I told him that its designing the interactions between a machine and a human being. “So what would you call this?” He asks holding a flute in front of me. “Is this interaction design or not?” I look at the flute… see each and every bore and the taper at the end where the lips touch the instrument. A simple piece of bamboo. And then realization dawns. “Yes”. I admit. Suddenly this man has managed to humble my IIT ego and put forth a very simple understanding. He blew into it and few melodious notes rand out. “Look at this… is it not interaction design at its most simple and basic level? I interact with this ‘machine’ and see what comes out of it!” He smiled.
Suddenly after 6 and a half years of being a design student and trying to find the right answer for the question- this man had managed to teach me the same in a matter of 52 seconds.

The Interaction Designer's Dilemma

As an interaction designer I often face a dilemma… which path to follow… Interaction design is by now an established discipline. An established discipline means that a lot of intellectual jargon has got associated with it. Related think tanks of the subjects have already devised a set of guidelines and processes to follow and emulate.
Here comes the problem…
Designing for interaction unlike other subjects is an extremely fluid field. The designer has to face a variety of problems. And not problems may be solved through fixed categories of contextual enquiry, usability goals, heuristic analysis etc. That’s jargon, which comes useful when a person is designing a ‘user centric’ solution to a problem. But things don’t always work like that. True, interaction design should keep the human factors paramount. But sometimes to design for human factors and user centric approach fails in the face of logical problem solving. Problems are not always independent entities. They are often part of an entire process or set of events. Sometimes the best solution is not just designing for the user at each node of the process but to try and achieve an overall optimization of the process.
So what path to follow for this? What can be an ideal approach to solve such problems? Clearly the standard HCI design principles miserably fail in this context. Then what is the ideal successful problem solving approach.
Truth is, there is none. So right now all that is possible is to adopt a hybrid approach which keeps the standard principles in mind but formulates its own way through logical reasoning and careful analysis of the entire process. Subsequently identifying the key points where various users interact with the bigger picture and find out how those interactions can be made useful and more fruitful.