A Brief History of theInteraction Design Association

Gregory Petroff

Treasurer and Board Member

A Call to Action From Bruce “Tog” Tognazzini

http://www.asktog.com/columns/057ItsTimeWeGotRespect.html

"I have met the enemy and he is us."

“When Pogo mouthed these words so many years ago, he must have been thinking of software designers, or interaction engineers, or human interface folks, or whatever we who create the interaction model for our products are calling ourselves this week…..”

Tog’s Challenge

Step 1: Name Ourselves

Step 2: Brand The Name

Step 3: Build the Interaction Architect's Association or SIG

Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini is a principal with the Nielsen Norman Group, the "dream team" firm specializing in human-computer interaction. Tog was lead designer at WebMD, the super-vertical start-up founded in February, 1996 by Jim Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics and Netscape. Before that, Tog was Distinguished Engineer for Strategic Technology at Sun Microsystems. During his 14 years at Apple Computer, he founded the Apple Human Interface Group and acted as Apple's Human Interface Evangelist. Tog has published two books, Tog on Interface and Tog on Software Design, both from Addison Wesley, and is currently publishing the free webzine, "AskTog."

A List is Born

A New Home for Interaction Designers

Friday, August 29, 2003 Challis Hodge Creates the first list on yahoo groups in response to Tog’s call.

“We’re here to create a home for interaction designers--what type of home that will be, we do not yet know. Whether we find or build our home, though, it must address the issues and challenges that the many hundreds of us face in our jobs.”

A Community Starts to Emerge

From September to October 2003 600 people join the list and start talking about Interaction Design

In October of 2003The list moves to interactiondesigners.com

The First Steering Committee is FormedChallis Hodge

David Heller

Rick Cecil

James Jarrett

Initial website available in 9 languages

We start to meet Face 2 Face

Growing the community by getting list members togetherEarly 2004

First in NYC in early 2004LondonBay Area Events

Late 2004 / Early 2005BostonPune, IndiaLos AngelesWashington DC

Fall 2005PortlandNorth Carolina

Growth of the Community

New Steering Committee in 2004 starts to look at what’s nextDavid Heller

Josh Seiden

Carrie Ritch

Rick Cecil

Advisory Board FormedAlan Cooper

Kim Goodwin

Challis Hodge

Henrik Olsen

Marc Rettig

Louis Rosenfeld

Nathan Shedroff

Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini

What do we do next?

In Late 2004 the Steering Committee (SC) asks for volunteers to join with them to spend the next six months planning and preparing a retreat to decide “What do we do next?”

The SC selects a wide group of individuals to participate in theprocess that represent a cross section of the list membership

The Group gets to work on planning, research and organization for the effort

Pre Retreat Events

Group A: User Research:Responsible for drafting member survey and interviewed IxD list members, created personas based on results of survey and interviews.

Group B: Competitive analysis:What do other organizations offer? How much do they charge? What is their killer app? Where do the other organizations find their volunteers? What organizations should we consider joining? What would be the process of joining those organizations?

Group C: Start our own corporation?:How do we go about becoming a not-for-profit?

What experiences can we learn from other recently created organizations in the user experience domain?

IxDG Retreat

June 17th – 19th 2005

Norwalk Connecticut

Community Size1550+ on the list

Retreat Participants

Micah Alpern

Mauro Cavalletti

Lisa deBettencourt

Lada Gorlenko

David Heller

Kevin Narey

Gregory Petroff

Frank Ramirez

Robert Reimann

Carrie Ritch

Dan Saffer (via phone)

Joshua Seiden

Luke Wroblewski

Getting to Work

Some pictures from the Retreat

Some pictures from the Retreat

Hard at work

What Questions were we trying to address?

Join another organization or form our own?

What is the purpose of the group?

What initiatives could we undertake that would best support the needs of individual interaction designers?

What is our relationship to the greater user experience community?

How do we make it happen?

Results from the Retreat

Form an organization for Interaction Designers and call it the IxDA: Interaction Design Association

IxDA Purpose as defined at the Retreat

To help improve the human condition by improving the quality of behavior of artifacts, environments, and systems.

IxDA Goals as defined at the Retreat

To this end, the IxDA’s goal is to help IxD practitioners grow and flourish professionally via these means:

Helping practitioners understand how design of behavior fits into existing design and development processes

Helping practitioners provide the highest possible value to stakeholders and users

Helping to foster a vibrant community and to facilitate knowledge exchange between members

Empowering and inspiring practitioners to discover, innovate, mentor, and evangelize the process, attributes, and results of IxD

IxDA’s commitment to the User Experience Community

IxDA supports the endeavors of UXnet and is committed to its principles of cooperation and collaboration. The multidisciplinary nature of user experience (UX) work demands cooperation among both UX professionals and the organizations that serve them. Through our initiatives and events, IxDA will strive to create and pursue opportunities for collaborating with UXnet and its participating organizations, with the goal of promoting design and business practices that better support the creation of useful, usable, desirable, and valuable products and services.

www.uxnet.org

First Year Priority

The IxDA’s goal is to help IxD practitioners grow and flourish professionally via these means:

Helping practitioners understand how design of behavior fits into existing design and development processes

Helping practitioners provide the highest possible value to stakeholders and users

Helping to foster a vibrant community and to facilitate knowledge exchange between members

Empowering and inspiring practitioners to discover, innovate, mentor, and evangelize the process, attributes, and results of IxD

Building a Long Term Mission

Community Building

Professionalism

Education Innovation

Evangelism

Community allows communication of standards

High standards facilitate innovationStandards drive education

Value built accelerates evangelism

IxDA Structure

IxDA Community Vision Statement

IxDA needs to create an infrastructure that is both scalable and sustainable for community building.

IxDA needs to design/develop/adopt a suite of tools and organizational initiatives to enable the full range of community of practice knowledge sharing and dissemination both online and offline.

IxDA Community Center

IxD Community Center

Local Groups

Steering Committee

• Conversations – Threaded Discussions• Opinions – Blogs/Blog Index/Debate• Reference – Docs (Practices, Patterns,

Case Studies, etc.) / Index• Events – Local/Global Calendar• Local/Global People Finder• Job/Resume Library• Industry/Org News• Horizontal Search/Filter

• Events• Initiatives• News

• Conferences (ours or our presence at others)

• Initiatives• News

Org Members• Discussion• Topic creation/admin• Rating submissions• Doc submissions• Blog/Link submissions• Job/resume postings• News• Bios

The Community Center is a place where knowledge is shared and organizationalinitiatives are made manifest.

The Community Center is self-sustainingbecause it relies on a framework of decentralized administration and authority.

The Summer of Organization

June-September 2005

Getting Organized

Working on governance

Preparing legal documents for Incorporation

Selecting the First Board

Electing the new orgs first Officers

IxDG > IxDA Birth of an organization

Incorporation Date September 29, 2005

Announced to the List October 17, 2005

Community Size1800+ on the list

Your Executive Committee Leadership:

Robert Reimann

President

Manager of User Interface Design and Research, at Bose Corporation

David Heller

Co-Founder and Vice President, Internationalization Task Force Team Leader, List Management Task Force Team Leader, and Web Design and Development Task Force Team Leader

Principal Product Designer, at Intralinks, Inc.

IXDA Executive Committee Leadership

Gregory Petroff

Treasurer

Associate Director, Interaction Design, at Modem Media

Lada Gorlenko

Secretary

User Experience Consultant, at IBM

Board Members: Retreat Members +1

Micah Alpern

Mauro Cavalletti

Lisa deBettencourt

Lada Gorlenko

Pabini Gabriel-Petit

David Heller

Kevin Narey

Gregory Petroff

Frank Ramirez

Robert Reimann

Carrie Ritch

Dan Saffer (via phone)

Joshua Seiden

Luke Wroblewski

From the President:

“Our name change represents much more than just a new identity. IxDA is nowa true non-profit, member-supported professional organization and is thefirst such organization to recognize and focus on the unique contributionof interaction design and interaction design professionals to the fieldsof product user experience design.”

From the President:

“The creation of the Interaction Design Association is the culmination of months of work by a team of dedicated and talented individuals who now form the first IxDA Board of Directors. The outcome of the IxDG Leadership Retreat early thissummer led us to conclude that the best way to serve the IxD community worldwide—as represented by you, the subscribers to our mailing lists was to create a professional organization of international scope; an organization informed by a new, 21st-century perspective based on collaboration and community, rather than more traditional—and bureaucratic—approaches…”

How can you help?

Contribute your technical expertise

Contribute leadership

Make a financial contribution

Community Size as of March 20, 20062200+ on the list