I'm in a small shop in which designers wear three hats. We design
functionality when we specify what operations and information to expose to
the user. We design interaction when we specify how to expose them, and how
the user will interact with the application to use them. We wear our
"application business analyst" hats when we analyze and specify the business
needs the functionality will meet. We have two dedicated UI
designers/front-end developers who design the appearance and layout, and
code the browser-side logic.
Interaction design is where we do the most cross-functional collaboration,
because the front-end developers have to be able to make it possible (and
often have great ideas) and the server-side developers have to deliver
everything we need for the interaction in the page and handle discrete
transactions with or without new pages. It's also the most challenging in
that it's the perspective that our business stakeholders and user
representatives "get" and the language they speak in ("Can we just add a
little button over here that will ...") so we have to do the most
translation and expectation management.
I work on a web-delivered application, so the "front-end/back-end" divider
doesn't work well in this context. It would mean that functional design
specified server-side system behaviors, and interaction design specified all
browser-side system and user behaviors. We focus the design of functionality
and of interaction both on the browser side. We treat server-side operations
as a black box
--
Faith Peterson
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
On 10/19/07, Switzky, Andrew <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>
> Okay, so then how would you distinguish between an
> interaction designer and a functional designer? Are they the same?
>
> I think functional designer should mean the same thing as interaction
> designer. It's a good way to explain what you do to business systems
> analysts, project managers and developers as well as to clients.
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