Like many in the interaction design community, my proposed session for Interaction 2011 was unfortunately rejected.  At first, I was pretty bummed about it, but after seeing the ranks of people I’m with (some of my heros in the community), I don’t feel as bad.  The conference will certainly be unreal.

Meanwhile, taking a cue from Whitney Hess (@whitneyhess) and David Farkas (@dafark8), I thought I’d post my submission here for comment.  This talk centers around something I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking and talking informally about, and I’m looking forward to giving it as a formal presentation at some point in the near future (Are you organizing a conference?  Like this idea for a talk?  Give me a shout.)

Anyway, per Whitney, I want to use this as an opportunity to improve the quality of this talk idea, so I encourage comments and thoughts about this as a topic.

And if you’re going to Interaction ’11, I’ll see you there!  Let’s grab a beer and chat.

Here’s the session:

Design Over Time: How Adaptive Interfaces Can Create Remarkable Experiences

So many of our interactions with interfaces are tantamount to amnesic episodes – passing experiences that show no respect for our history with the object, leaving us to restart our relationship from scratch each time.

The design of interactions over time is about recognizing the relationship between the actor and object, and designing to acknowledge and enhance that relationship beyond an atomic interaction.  As designers, if we can think of the scale of time as a major design criterion, we can craft experiences that are evolutionary and more engaging for our users.  Unfortunately, most interfaces today aren’t designed with this relationship in mind, instead preferring to reset at zero each time we interact.

This session will focus on designing interfaces that adapt to a user over time to enhance that user’s experience.  From better grocery checkout experiences to smarter internet browsing, we’ll look at where user behavior data can be leveraged to create more engaging and personalized experiences.

The goals of the session will be to provide context around how to think about time in terms of interaction design, identify areas of opportunity that are common across various design applications with regards to leveraging behavior data over time to design experiences, and leave the audience with a framework for identifying these opportunities in their projects.