[4] To Moggridge, it was an improvement over soft-face, which he had coined in 1984 to refer to the application of industrial design to products containing software.
[5] The earliest programs in design for interactive technologies were the Visible Language Workshop, started by Muriel Cooper at MIT in 1975, and the Interactive Telecommunications Program founded at NYU in 1979 by Martin Elton and later headed by Red Burns.
[7] At the outset, the program focused mainly on screen interfaces, before shifting to a greater emphasis on the "big picture" aspects of interaction—people, organizations, culture, service and system.
After Ivrea, Crampton Smith and Philip Tabor added the Interaction Design (IxD) track in the Visual and Multimedia Communication at the University of Venice, Italy.
"[1]: xxviii, 31 Alan Cooper argues in The Inmates Are Running the Asylum that we need a new approach to solving interactive software-based problems.
Cooper introduces the concept of cognitive friction, which is when the interface of a design is complex and difficult to use, and behaves inconsistently and unexpectedly, possessing different modes.
[13] A persona encapsulates critical behavioural data in a way that both designers and stakeholders can understand, remember, and relate to.
Cognitive dimensions offer a lightweight approach to analysis of a design quality, rather than an in-depth, detailed description.
They provide a common vocabulary for discussing notation, user interface or programming language design.
Dimensions provide high-level descriptions of the interface and how the user interacts with it: examples include consistency, error-proneness, hard mental operations, viscosity and premature commitment.
Visual representations are the elements of an interface that the user perceives; these may include but are not limited to "typography, diagrams, icons, and other graphics".