I've been interested for decades now in how things work when people use or interact with them, and how to make them work better so that people are more successful with less effort, and, ultimately, happier as they use technology in their life.
I was curious about these things in school and could tell that there were some things that were a pleasure to use and make me feel productive and successful and there were other things that made me angry and sometimes completely kept me from getting done what I wanted to. Around the time I finished college, I read Don Norman's Design of Everyday Things and I started down the path towards taking on interaction design as my craft.
Over the intervening years, I've seen new technology while working in MIT's patent and licensing office, worked at IT help desks, evaluated, designed, managed and sold (pretty much everything but wrote code for) technology projects including help desk software, accounting software, lobby touch-screen kiosks to enterprise system management software.
As an interaction designer, I believe my talents and responsibilities are to:
- understand existing and potential users of a system (device, web site, beaurocracy, or whatever), how they think, what their goals are, and what constraints they live under,
- design how a system should work in order to meet users' goals, collaborating with engineers, graphic designers, product managers and marketers to ensure that the system is an all-around success, and
- evaluate existing or proposed systems for their usefulness and usability.
I am fortunate to have worked on a large clean-slate project with excellent designers and teachers from Cooper Software (founded by Alan Cooper of The Inmates are Running the Asylum). I have also had the good fortune to work on smaller, agile development projects to hone my skills at collaborating with teams of people developing incremental improvements to a production system.
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