A Brief History of the Interaction Design Association by Gregory Petroff, Aug 2006

1. A Brief History of the
Interaction Design Association
Gregory Petroff
Treasurer and Board Member

2. A Call to Action From Bruce “Tog” Tognazzini
http://www.asktog.com/columns/057ItsTime
WeGotRespect.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…..”

3. 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."

4. 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.”

5. A Community Starts to Emerge
From September to October 2003 600 people join the list and
start talking about Interaction Design
In October of 2003
The list moves to interactiondesigners.com
The First Steering Committee is Formed
Challis Hodge
David Heller
Rick Cecil
James Jarrett
Initial website available in 9 languages

6. We start to meet Face 2 Face
Growing the community by getting list members together
Early 2004
First in NYC in early 2004
London
Bay Area Events
Late 2004 / Early 2005
Boston
Pune, India
Los Angeles
Washington DC
Fall 2005
Portland
North Carolina

7. Growth of the Community
New Steering Committee in 2004 starts to look at what’s next
David Heller
Josh Seiden
Carrie Ritch
Rick Cecil
Advisory Board Formed
Alan Cooper
Kim Goodwin
Challis Hodge
Henrik Olsen
Marc Rettig
Louis Rosenfeld
Nathan Shedroff
Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini

8. 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 the
process that represent a cross section of the list membership
The Group gets to work on planning, research and organization
for the effort

9. 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?

10. Community Size
1550+ on the list
IxDG Retreat
June 17th – 19th 2005
Norwalk Connecticut

11. 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

12. Getting to Work

13. Some pictures from the Retreat

14. Some pictures from the Retreat

15. Hard at work

16. 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?

17. Results from the Retreat
Form an organization for Interaction Designers and call it
the IxDA: Interaction Design Association

18. IxDA Purpose as defined at the Retreat
To help improve the human
condition by improving the
quality of behavior of artifacts,
environments, and systems.

19. 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

20. IxDA’s commitment to the User Experience Community
IxDA supports the endeavors of UXnet and is
committed to its principles of cooperation and
www.uxnet.org
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.

21. 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

22. Building a Long Term Mission
Community Building
Community allows communication of standards
Professionalism
Standards drive education High standards facilitate innovation
Education Innovation
Value built accelerates evangelism
Evangelism

23. IxDA Structure

24. 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.

25. IxDA Community Center
The Community Center is a place where
Steering Committee knowledge is shared and organizational
• Conferences (ours or our initiatives are made manifest.
presence at others)
• Initiatives The Community Center is self-sustaining
• News because it relies on a framework of
decentralized administration and authority.
IxD Community Center
• 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 Org Members
• Industry/Org News
• Discussion
• Horizontal Search/Filter
• Topic creation/admin
Local Groups • Rating submissions
• Doc submissions
• Events • Blog/Link submissions
• Initiatives • Job/resume postings
• News • News
• Bios

26. The Summer of Organization
June-September 2005

27. Getting Organized
Working on governance
Preparing legal documents for Incorporation
Selecting the First Board
Electing the new orgs first Officers

28. Community Size
1800+ on the list
IxDG > IxDA Birth of an organization
Incorporation Date September 29, 2005
Announced to the List October 17, 2005

29. 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.

30. IXDA Executive Committee Leadership
Gregory Petroff
Treasurer
Associate Director, Interaction Design, at
Modem Media
Lada Gorlenko
Secretary
User Experience Consultant, at IBM

31. 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

32. From the President:
“Our name change represents much more
than just a new identity. IxDA is now
a true non-profit, member-supported
professional organization and is the
first such organization to recognize and focus
on the unique contribution
of interaction design and interaction design
professionals to the fields
of product user experience design.”

33. 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 this
summer 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…”

34. Community Size as of March 20, 2006
2200+ on the list
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