Interfaces are one of the principal sources from which a person learns about his or her work. That understanding gets turned into diagrams, charts, and maps that, whether accurate or not, come to define the work that person does each day… . This brings a new dimension of responsibility to our table as interaction designers. Not only do we need to worry about our interfaces being simple, or elegant, or usable, or accessible; we also have to make sure they’re honest. Do they accurately portray our clients’ processes? Do they faithfully represent the relationships between different bodies of information? Do they tell the truth, or do they lie? Ultimately, whatever they say is going to define how our users think of their work, how they understand it, and how they do it.

Posted on February 8, 2010