Interactive Design

The ins and outs of all things interactive

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Interactive Design


What is interactive design?

Well the definition of interactive is: Interacting with a human user, often in a conversational way, to obtain data or commands and to give immediate results or updated information. (dictionary.com)

And the definition of design is: to prepare the preliminary sketch or the plans for (a work to be executed), esp. to plan the form and structure. (dictionary.com)

Therefore one would think that interactive design is to 'prepare' a work in which a human user can obtain information.

However this definition is not quite there. When the words 'interactive' and 'design' are put together, the definition becomes the study of devices and programs in which users can interact.

Basically, what this means is that interactive design is highly centred around of course, interactivity within your electronic life. A type of interactive design that most people use every single day is in the form of websites.

Here are a few examples of what I find to be good/ effective web design:


(6)
(7)
As you can see in the above websites, they are laid out in such a way so that it is easy to navigate. Here they have clear page headings and obvious links. However, in the below website for UWS, I believe that it is quite poorly constructed. This is due to the large amount of clickable links along with the lack of any structure to the page. This ultimately makes it an extremely hard to navigate page.

(8)


No comments:

Post a Comment