Trendwatch

Digital interactive media is still relatively young and everyone’s process is evolving to get a better grasp on how to manage the strategy, design and technology to deliver the best solutions. As a profession, we are constantly challenging ourselves, looking for new and better ways to do our work. We look inside the field but outside as well, to other, more established disciplines, borrowing from them where it makes sense, to provide more rounded perspective to the complex organism we’re trying to shape. Some ideas stick, some must be discarded as they don’t prove out. Regardless, we must march on, pursuing our quest for the better process. Always forward.

One trend that has emerged over the years and has established itself fairly well is combining philosophies and methodologies from traditional communication design and product design. Both are helpful in crafting successful online experiences. Communication design practices direct us to make information crisp and entertaining, while product design processes help ensure that the solution is usable, useful and profitable.

One of the greatest gifts that product design has bestowed upon the field of interactive design is a User-Centered Design (UCD) methodology. Some practitioners, mostly on the development side, have called aspects of UCD into question, saying that it takes too long. Some have advocated for a process philosophy called “Agile” instead. Agile involves collaborative teams working rapidly on contained, manageable chunks of work, releasing and refining through several iterations. Some UCD loyalists have argued that Agile minimizes the role of design, leading to sub-standard results. Boxes and Arrows recently published an interesting article examining the merits of both approaches and looking at ways to combine them effectively.

Out of necessity, a trend has emerged around processes and tools to help facilitate remote collaboration. More and more, we are working remotely in distributed teams and with that, new processes are required to keep everyone aligned and on track. Among many online collaboration tools to come on the scene, GoogleWave made a splash (pun intended) this year and is generating a lot of excitement among its early adopters. Some describe it as the way email would have been designed if they were to create it today. Many agree that it will replace email. The app lets you create “waves” with people you’re connected with. A wave is sort of a multi-media discussion thread that blends the pre-existing paradigms of email, social networking, instant messaging (chat), Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS), etc. It’s pretty cool, you can learn more about it here: http://wave.google.com