OVERVIEW

There are detailed design principles for major kinds of interactive products presented in the chapters ahead. But, whether your interactive product is an information system, a learning system, e-commerce, or interactive entertainment, the design of the product begins when you ask yourself two simple questions: (1) Who are the users? (2) What is their role?

These are the questions that novices in the business of interactive design either forget to ask, or ask too late in the design process for it to do any good. When that happens, their creations become linear works with minimalist interactivity.

Minimalist interactivity is my name for a few extremely fundamental acts that form part of any interactive experience, but should never be considered the interactive experience as a whole. The mistake is to think that adding minimalist acts to a linear program makes it truly interactive.

My list of the most notorious minimalist interactivities includes page turning, lookups, side games, and talkabouts. Let s review them one at a time and then come back and review those fundamental questions in light of specific interactive designs.

PAGE TURNING AND NAVIGATION

It is remarkable that some designers consider the fundamental navigation of a linear or even branching story the heart of its interactivity. The fact that users can progress through a story in a linear fashion, skip ahead, or review what they had previously read is so fundamental to any interactive system that it can hardly be considered the heart of the experience, any more than...