Gearing Up the Knowledge Engineers: Experience Design Through Effective Human-Computer Interaction

Abstract

Common sense may say that experience design provides the necessary framework to enable successful media convergence. The rationale of this professional practice is to provide a set of goals and objectives that serve to meet the needs of both the end-user and the sourcing organization. Effective experience design is however more than the provision of Web-mediated pages that offer a plethora of interactive media and digital informational artefacts. No longer is it sufficient to design and implement information systems (IS) that are divorced from the vagaries of human interaction online. This chapter will show that convergent media is emerging through an applied social-contextual lens. Moreover, we now know that effective human-computer interaction (HCI) involves a dichotomous relationship between the machine-dimension and a human-dimension, where the social context constructs of IS usage has changed the media landscape. Nevertheless the importance of balancing the HCI environment is often lost along the IS-design pathway. Too often the resulting digital artefacts present divergent functionality, where the machine-dimension is separated completely from the human-dimension. In recent times, and with the advent of information and communications technology (ICT) media tools, there has been a softer approach taken by experience design to provide lifestyle change. Individuals welcome the flexibility of the asynchronous nature of their interactive media. To manage such convergence in a business firm per se, this chapter is suggesting that it is the changeable nature of the HCI environment that must be understood by knowledge engineers (DeLong, Lost knowledge: Confronting the threat of an aging workforce. New York: Oxford, 2004) as they craft IS that will enable efficient and effective media convergence.