Checking my pulse

Dan Saffer just wrote an interesting piece on why someone might want to be an interaction designer. To be honest, this was probably only interesting because I am an interaction designer. To anyone else, it might seem a little dull, if not totally pointless.

In fact, you might even be asking yourself, so what’s an interaction designer when it’s all at home? Well, an interaction designer is the person who tries to understand how you would best be able to work with a piece of software (a website, say, or a word processor, or that database application you use at work) and then works with you and the software folk to come up with the optimal design. Ever heard the word ‘usability’? Well, we’re the people who try to achieve it.

Anyway, the interesting thing was that the reasons he gave for being one of these (an interest in human psychology, lots of variety in the work, lots of problem-solving, it's fun playing with cool new technologies all the time, and, of course, wanting to make the world a better place) are essentially the reasons that motivated me all those years ago when I first got into this game. And it begs the question, are these the reasons I’m still at it, twenty-five years later?

Certainly, you don’t do this job to get rich. Although really good interaction designers are as rare as hens’ teeth and despite the fact that their impact on a project can be enormous and have huge financial benefits, they don’t get paid much more than a halfway-decent Java programmer – which are ten-a-penny and often wear really nerdy T-shirts.

You also don’t do it for the respect of your peers. Most people – including your management, the IT team, even the end-users you work with – don’t quite understand why you’re on the project. ‘Surely we could just let the programmers design the screens,’ they say. ‘No, we can’t afford to spend so much time understanding our users and the tasks they do,’ they say. ‘And why would you want to test the product with the people who are supposed to use it? The people who built it find it easy enough to understand.’ To get good work is an uphill struggle, all the time. Most of the people who buy or build IT systems just assume they will be ‘user friendly’. It doesn’t seem to matter how many times they are obviously and patently proven wrong.

Yet interaction design has given me a comfortable living for a quarter of a century now and that’s not a bad thing. (My English working-class background has instilled in me the absolute imperative to be a steady, consistent wage-earner and to abhor the idea of unemployment. So, keeping me off the dole queue is something for which I’m grateful to my chosen career.)

And, although the sceptics on the IT team may not see the point, on those rare days when I’m running a user requirements workshop, or working with users in their workplace to understand exactly what their job is and how to support it, and one of them says, ‘I’m really glad someone is actually listening to us at last,’ months of rejection and struggle are blown away and I actually feel my life is worthwhile.

So I guess that, deep down, below all those years of cynicism and all the other defences against a world that doesn’t understand or appreciate what I do, it is the chance of doing something that will make a real difference to people’s lives that keeps me logging on in the morning. I hope that enthusiastic youngsters like Dan can say the same thing a couple of decades from now.