Self-study Interaction Design
Last updated: 2019 October 26
In classes and cocktail hours, lots of people ask me either how they can switch careers into interaction design, or how they can improve their self-trained “IxD” chops.
Of course many companies offer training courses to help folks do just that and there are great university courses around the world (but not everyone can take that kind of time off).
So if you’re a self-starter, unable to attend a training session and can’t take time off for school, or an “outsider” wanting to be able to speak the language of interaction design, what can you do? How can you make those first steps to getting more familiar with the field?
I recommend reading up on some of the fundamentals, join up with practitioners online, and actually start designing. More on each follows.
Read up on the fundamentals
Get your hands on copies of the following three books and give them a good read. Not a flip through, and not a skim. These are the basic things you need to know.
Norman plainly lays out the fundamentals of design thinking from cognitive psychology, industrial design, and interaction design standpoints. If you had time to only read one thing to get to know the fundamentals of the field, read this. (Here’s a refresher if you haven’t read it in years.)
Though personas are a beleaguered concept, and I have my issues with the book, it’s important for literacy. “Inmates” details the reasons why designers should lead the charge of software design, and why personas are the primary tool we use to do it.
AF4 contains best practices for the medium of the human-computer interface. It reads a bit like a textbook, but that’s because it was trying to be exhaustive. Full disclosure: I’m a co-author on it. I helped bring it up to modern times with designing for mobility and a few other things. I don’t get a dime from it, if that helps you address of the virtue of my recommending it.
Designing for narrow AI
Designing today increasingly includes incorporating some aspects of narrow artificial intelligence, so I would also recommend building some familiarity and skill with those topics.
Often times AI affords natural language input and output, so build a familiarity with the basics of conversational analysis and conversation design. I recommend Cathy Pearl’s book, Designing Voice User Interfaces: Principles of Conversational Experiences.
A lot of what makes AI different to design for is that it can act as an assistant (helping users do a task) or an agent (doing the task for them), and each requires rethinking core user-does-task models of interaction design. I’m still working on a book about designing assistants (and I don’t know of an alternative to recommend in the meantime) but I wrote this book about the design of agents, which I, of course, recommend: Designing Agentive Technology: AI That Works for People.
Design literacy for AI ideally includes an understanding of the component technologies, like regression analysis, anomaly detection, classifiers, and machine learning. (Sorry that they sound scary.) I am just starting to read Hebron’s ebook “Machine Learning for Designers,” so your mileage may vary, but there is a paucity of good publications on the subject, so for good measure…
The People + AI Guidebook by Google’s PAIR group is also an excellent resource for design and AI. (Full disclosure, I was a consultant on it.)
Two last additions.
If you’re interested in the speculative possibilities of general AI and super AI (the kind we most often see in sci-fi) the key work in this space is Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence. It is a dense read, so if you want a visual Cliff’s Notes, I happened to have sketchnoted the later chapters.
If you’re interested in speculative technology or sci-fi, I’ll certainly also recommend my own book on that topic and blog as a way of applying design thinking to interfaces that appear in that perennially-favorite genre, but it’s hardly considered a fundamental.
Ethics
Much recent design discourse is focused on the ethics of the systems we help build. So if you feel comfortable with the basics, it’s important to consider the large-scale implications of the things you build (and how designers can help not make things worse.) For that, I recommend Cennydd Bowles’ Future Ethics, since it is written with designers in mind.
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Ok. That’s a list of fundamental topics. Note that this list is preferential to books. It would be much longer if I was including online resources, but I figure you can search for those on your own.
Join conversations
A next thing you can do is to get involved with current conversations by practicing interaction designers. That can be in person, by attending conferences and local groups, or it can be online in forums. However you do it, when you join these conversations, you become familiar with shared vocabulary, ways of discussing, and current concerns of real practitioners.
In person: Attend gatherings
- IXDA: The most active and relevant to practitioners, IXDA has an annual conference and lots of active, local chapters
- ACM SIGCHI: More formal and aimed at students and academics, the CHI conferences are where you’ll encounter smart people pushing at the forefront of interaction design knowledge
- Local Meet-Ups: Meetup.com is a website where you can find folks interested in meeting around particular topics.
Online: Follow feeds
There are lots of design blogs and social media feeds each with its own take on the practice. Here are four, top of mind. Note that almost any other designer will have different answers to this same question.
If your learning style is more towards listening than reading, there are a few good podcasts.
And though it’s more about design generally, the mother of all design podcasts is 99% invisible.
If you’re the Twittering sort, you can subscribe to some of these same feeds. Or you could set up Tweetdeck as an agent to watch for UX topics of interest like I do.
Online (advanced): Use forums
Forums are places where you can read past and current threads (and of course run into trolls and get burned in flame wars, so keep a clear head about yourself.) Google Groups and Yahoo! groups recently closed, leaving us with only the IXDA forums that are fairly active with practitioners. (Comment if you know of others.)
Most importantly, start designing
That’s right, start designing. Start today. It doesn’t have to be a massive undertaking. There are lots of problems in the world with existing products, experiences, and services for which the tools of interaction design can help shape an answer. Find them and tackle them using materials at hand. Post them to a blog or use them as material in an online portfolio. Get good at solving design problems well with limited time and on a limited budget, and you’ll be a shoo-in. ☺
As an example of this kind of design, I used to spearhead a series of speculative-design to such problems. Because it was speculative, I titled it The Drawing Board. Watch a few of these to see examples of designers tackling a problem in a lightweight way. The following is the most recent at the time of publication.
You can also find a small real-world project, like a website for yourself or a friend. Whatever the project, challenge yourself to put into practice everything that you’ve learned in order to demonstrate a deep understanding of the topics. These self-starter projects will give you practice and something to discuss with potential clients or employers.
Branching out from here (brace yourself)
It gets deep quickly, and there are dozens of ways to specialize your knowledge. These are just a few…
- More fundamentals: The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design, Designing Interfaces, Designing for Interaction
- Cognitive Psychology: The Humane Interface, Mind Hacks, The Media Equation, Mental Models
- Best Practices: Universal Principles of Design, Universal Methods of Design
- User Research: The User is Always Right
- Information architecture: Information Architecture for the World Wide Web
- Systems thinking: A Pattern Language (and its companion The Timeless Way of Building), Growing Wings on the Way, the first appendix of The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization
- Visual design (for interaction projects): The Elements of Graphic Design, Making and Breaking the Grid, Thinking with Type, The Art of Color
- Usability: Don’t Make Me Think
- Content strategy: Content Everywhere
- How to program: Design by Numbers (very basics), Processing, HTML5
- Search: Ambient Findability, Search Analytics for Your Site
- Good consulting: Flawless Consulting, Getting to Yes
- Interaction design history: Vannevar Bush, Marshal McLuhan, Richard Wurman, Molly Steenson (There’s lots more)
- Group dynamics: Communities of Practice, Community Building on the Web
- Service Design: The Experience Economy, Service Design
- The design process: Pair Design, Designing for the Digital Age: How to Create Human-Centered Products and Services
- The bigger picture: Business Model Generation, Value Proposition Design
- The smaller picture: Microinteractions
- More general design and technology blogs: FastCompany, Signal vs. Noise, How Design Inspiration, Smashing Magazine, Design Observer
Interaction design is a deep, deep pool (that’s part of why I love it) but it’s not inaccessible. Get interested and start following some of these leads, find new ones, and you’ll be thinking like an interaction designer before you know it.
