Towards Generic Interaction Styles for Product Design

A growing uneasiness among users with the experience of current product user interfaces mounts pressure on interaction designers to innovate user interface conventions. In previous research we have shown that a study of the history of product interaction triggers a broader discussion of interaction qualities among designers in a team, and that the naming of interaction styles helps establish an aesthetics of interaction design. However, that research focused on one particular product field, namely industrial controllers, and it was yet to be proven, if interaction styles do have generic traits across a wider range of interactive products. In this paper we report on five years of continued research into interaction styles for telephones, kitchen equipment, HiFi products and medical devices, and we show how it is indeed possible and beneficial to formulate a set of generic interaction styles.