The son of a plumber and a psychologist, Dan feels the interaction design he does is a little bit of both. Since 1995, he’s designed everything from websites to consumer electronics to robots. He feels that design isn’t only about problem solving, but about creating a better, more humane, future.
At Smart Design, Dan is one of the directors of the interaction design practice, leading and advising teams to create new interaction paradigms across a wide range of products, spanning both digital and physical. Dan’s insightful, thoughtful approach to design has been captured in the three books he’s written—Designing for Interaction, Designing Gestural Interfaces, and Designing Devices—which are required reading for any student of interaction design.
In 2008, he coined the term “topless meeting” (for a meeting without laptops), which was a finalist for Oxford Dictionary’s Word of the Year and Time Magazine’s #10 Buzzword of 2008. He has a Masters of Design in Interaction Design from Carnegie Mellon University.
Follow him on Twitter: @odannyboy
“The details are not the details. They make the design.” — Charles Eames
The difference between a good product and a great one are its details: the microinteractions that make up the small moments inside and around features. How do you turn on mute on your phone? How do you know you have a new email message? How can you change a setting? All these little moments–which are typically not on any feature list and often ignored–can change a product from one that is tolerated to one that’s beloved. This talk provides a new way of thinking about designing digital products: as a series of microinteractions that are essential to bringing personality and delight to applications and devices. We’ll delve into the structure of microinteractions—Triggers, Rules, Feedback, and Loops—and talk about why you should: Bring The Data Forward, Don’t Start From Zero, Use What is Often Overlooked, and Play The Long Game.