Interaction design
Going beyond borders
In bigger programming teams, you have experts for specific parts of your application. For example, product developers deliver the concept, user interface experts propose the mockups, and graphic designers come up with a nice design. In such a setup, programmers are often seen just as the ones who turn the design into a working application.
A successful product is more than a set of interactive mockups. The application should be engineered by developers who have a passion for detail, keep the end users in mind, and focus on making the product easy to understand and use. I have always worked in different positions in these fields, whether my focus was on concept, design, programming, deployment, testing, or project management. For me, a successful product is one that satisfies its users.
Interaction design can be understood in simple (but not simplified) terms: it is the design of the interaction between users and products. Most often when people talk about interaction design, the products tend to be software products like apps or websites. The goal of interaction design is to create products that enable the user to achieve their objective(s) in the best way possible.
Dimensions of interaction design
If the definition of interaction design sounds broad, that’s because the field is rather wide: the interaction between a user and a product often involves elements like aesthetics, motion, sound, space, and many more. And of course, each of these elements can involve even more specialized fields, like sound design for the crafting of sounds used in user interactions.
As you might already realize, there’s a huge overlap between interaction design and UX design. After all, UX design is about shaping the experience of using a product, and most of that experience involves some interaction between the user and the product. But UX design is more than interaction design: it also involves user research (finding out who the users are in the first place), creating user personas (why, and under what conditions, would they use the product), performing user testing and usability testing, etc. To sum it up, when we talk about interaction design, we mean the tuning of these things:
Words
Words, especially those used in interactions, like button labels, should be meaningful and simple to understand. They should communicate information to users, but not so much that it overwhelms them. A button text should always anticipate the next step (for example, “To article” instead of “Next”). And a headline should not be an empty introduction, but whet the reader’s appetite for the next section.
Visual representations
This concerns graphical elements like images, typography and icons that users interact with. These usually supplement the words used to communicate information to users.
You should work with graphical elements the user knows from other places on the internet. Use imagery that does not look or feel like stock material and that makes users believe they are in the right place.
Objects and space
How do users interact with the product? On a smartphone, with their fingers? And within what kind of physical space does the user do so? For instance, is the user standing in a crowded train while using the app on a smartphone, or sitting at a desk in the office surfing the website? These all affect the interaction between the user and the product. They also flow into the choice and positioning of digital objects and into the viewport space itself. After all, every application also lives on white space.
Time
This dimension refers to media that changes over time (animation, videos, sounds). Motion and sounds play an important role in giving visual and audio feedback to users’ interactions. Also of concern is the amount of time a user spends interacting with the product: can users track their progress, or resume their interaction some time later?
Behavior
This includes the mechanism of a product: how do users perform actions on the website or the app? How do users operate the product? In other words, it’s how the previous dimensions define the interactions of a product. It also includes reactions, like the emotional responses or feedback of users.
Did you know…? When you are talking to someone and you give a reason for what you are saying, your chance of convincing them is on average 25% higher than if you give no reason.
Michael Wutzke, Usability Expert Frankfurt
Typical tasks
You might ask: what does an interaction designer typically do? The answer is simple: it depends on the context of the given project and the rest of the team.
For instance, if the company is large enough and has sufficient resources, it might have separate jobs for UX designers and interaction designers. In a large design team, there might be a UX researcher, an information architect, an interaction designer, and a visual designer, for instance. But in smaller companies and teams, most of the UX design job might be done by perhaps 1 or 2 people, who might or might not have the title of “Interaction Designer”. In any case, here are some of the tasks developers often handle in their daily work:
Design strategy
Design strategy is concerned with what the goal(s) of a user are, and in turn what interactions are necessary to achieve these goals. Depending on the company, interaction designers might have to conduct user research to find out what the goals of the users are before creating a strategy that translates them into interactions.
Prototypes
As a developer, I have also created interactive mockups and wireframes that simulate possible user interactions. These click dummies are functional prototypes that look exactly like the finished app or website before they are actually programmed.
