Interaction Design as Business Lubricant

Abstract

A designer as manager is an invaluable asset. The strongest quality a designer can possess is the ability to empathize with people and understand their needs. The first rule of good design is to understand his or her audience; this applies when developing a product, but it also applies when facilitating in the boardroom. Designers have the uncanny ability to think above a situation and yet continually judge the ramifications of a group decision. This is extremely different from traditional project managers, people who may have gained their position because of their abilities to balance a budget or build a spreadsheet. A good designer looks at everyone's position at once; he or she is able to remain unmired in engineering's rat-holes or marketing's hyperactive vernacular jargon speak. A designer as strategist can take seemingly disparate haystacks of information and rearrange them to make sense—even to someone who is a layman. Consider the principles of information architecture applied not to a website but to an entire corporation. Along with empathizing with people's problems, good designers can organize schedules and deliverables, group tasks, and arrange ideas far more creatively than any other discipline. Designers are built to recognize disparate patterns across verticals. This is invaluable when developing products that span different mediums, such as a digital music player that interacts with a software application.