The Hills Are Alive with the Sound of Interaction Design
Amazon’s success could be seen less about the convenience of being online, and more about the fact it is present in more of your moments of engagement with a book.
Amazon understand that we live alongside books. We cross paths with them at all of these points. If Amazon can be present in more of those, we like Amazon more, we encounter them more, and they do better.
For creating more products in this mold, we can take the same, experiential view.
A video recorder doesn’t need to be seen to perform a task, just to be for the task of recording a programme. It can be – it is – an actor in your social life and life with media, and is helping along something that wants to happen already: You want to have a relationship with a soap opera; you want to discuss TV with your friends tomorrow. These are the important moments of engagement a VCR is participating in, and we should focus on those, not the fact it is incidentally being used to record broadcast programming.
Once you start trying to solve those problems, new ideas come, ones that aren’t described like “type some numbers on a remote control.”