Often, many designers approach interaction design as finding the perfect abstraction layer for a set of given tasks. I’m a big believer of metaphors, both semantic as well as interactive. A while ago, I designed an interaction that was loosely based on a retractable window shade. After, several rounds of usability tests and refinement, we got that down and moved on to bigger and better things. However, one of the things that I should’ve pushed for (and unfortunately didn’t) was to think about the “default” experience not just the “metaphorical” experience. Drawing from auto design, focusing on how the map light switch feels is one thing, but more importantly, is how that light switch comes out-of-the-box. By default, can it even be found? Mercedes thought about that and put some nice glow-in-the-dark paint on their switch, duh.

I guess what I’m saying is not that you have defaults, but the art is finding the right defaults. At Convio, we use persona data and analytics to help give us direction, but still, there are no silver bullet solutions.

Going back to the web, how much do we devote to defaults as we do on functionality or feel? For me personally, I think I need to push beyond the typical default settings and sample data stuff, and really think out-of-the-box, and ask myself what the default experience is really like. Really. I heard from a colleague saying how many of our customers don’t really get CRM, it’s just not how they think. Is the solution to find a CRM-infused business workflow so they can somehow get it? I don’t really think so. CRM is just a buzz-word … get the default experience right and our customers will be cruising with CRM without even knowing it. Give them more than initial dummy data. Perhaps start off the experience with a story about John Constituent, and then lay out the pieces of how they can reach and engage John.

The lesson I learned: user experiences can be lost in translation if you don’t give respect to the art of defaults.