Advancing interactivity: graphic designers’ practice-based contribution to developing the Web

ABSTRACT This article examines how graphic designers’ innovations in web design revealed the potential and capabilities of interactivity as a communication experience tool. During the early World Wide Web (1995–2008), graphic designers’ practice-based contribution to interactivity enhanced how people experienced this new technological domain. Few designers contributed to the scholarly discussion of interactivity. The main academic fields that did—Human–Computer Interaction, Interaction Design and Communication Theory—disregarded graphic design's contribution, slowing knowledge production around the nature and potential of interactivity. The article compares the three fields’ main ideas about interactivity to an analysis of 47 websites from 2008. It argues that although the idea of interactivity emerged as a transdisciplinary phenomenon, graphic designers’ practical implementation of interactivity in web design through the development of qualities of intuitiveness, enablement, responsiveness, connectivity, intentionality and experience extended its conceptualization beyond technical standards, functionality and theorization.