The bridge between Interaction Design (IxD) and Domain Driven Design (DDD)

Some time ago I read Alan Cooper's book on About Faces 3. I am currently reading his book "The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity". He makes a strong point that interaction design has to be based on research and that is has to be made by interaction designers and not engineers. Engineers think too technical and therefore will create too complicated solutions. Engineers don't know how "normal users" think. And he is right! But I think, it's not enough to have some "interaction designers" designing the interactions and then let the programmers write the code. That might be important. But it is equally important if not more important that the the developers deeply understands the problems domain and goals the users have.

There is a great one hour talk I really enjoyed: Martin Fowler and Dan North Point Out a Yawning Crevasse of Doom (I had to look up the words Yawning, Crevasse and Doom -- those British guys speak hard to understand English ;-)). Their point is that there has to be a bridge between developers and users in order to communicate as apposed to a ferry, where information is transported from one side to the other by someone like the interaction designer, marketing person or analyst.

The solution requires what Eric Evens describes in his book as Domain Driven Design (DDD) (BTW: Domain Driven Design Quickly is a 100 page book available online describing the essentials). One of the central ideas is to have a dialog between the developers and users to come up with a "ubiquitous language" to describe the "core domain". That is: use the same language when talking to the users as when talking about the code. Create classes and methods that model the domain using the same terminology used by the users when they talk about the problem domain.

To get better software we have apply the techniques of interaction design and we have to have a dialog with our users to be able to create models that match their mind sets.

Yes, I am guilty myself of not doing this. So, this post is a reminder for myself....

P.S.: After writing this post, I did some search on ("DDD and IxD") and I figured that about a year ago I started a discussion on this topic on the IxD mailing list. I wish I would have a better memory....