From the course: Creative Inspirations: Hot Studio, Experience Design

Interactive designers

Katrina Alcorn: One of the biggest challenges for those of us who work in interactive design as interactive designers is trying to always be broadening our skills and keeping up with technology and this gets more and more complicated because the web used to be a set of very simple interactions. It was basically hyperlinked text and there was only so much you could do and now we have Ajax technologies and we have this whole metaphor of what is a page on a website, has completely been blown out of the water. Now you may do a hundred things on a page and you may see a hundred different permutations of that page. It's not really a page anymore. So it's figuring out what information is on a website, what interactions are supported on a website, how those interactions unfold as someone steps through a path and there could be myriad paths. So it can be simple or it can be quite complicated. There is about a dozen of us and we fill up this mezzanine and our job is everything from the high level research that we do about users, so we will dig into a company, really understand their business problem, interview stakeholders and then do all kinds of different research techniques to understand their customers or their constituents. So we take it from research through strategy, which is coming up with the big idea and the big concepts and then all the way through detailed interaction design and information architecture and that's really different from the way a lot of design companies work, because a lot of design companies silo these different tasks, so they will have their strategists doing strategy and they have their researchers doing research and then they have the IAs doing information architecture. And I think what one of the things that attracts people to working here is that we get to do all of it. So it really stretches our brains.

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