Interaction Design: A detailed insight

Interaction Design has been incorporated into the web & graphic design jargon for over a decade now. However, the past couple of months has mirrored a resurrection of this concept; apparently, the concept of Interaction Design has been thrown around a lot lately.  The technological evolution has played a crucial role in revamping the concept of interaction design as a whole. Initially, the concept was confined to working with images and text, but today, it’s tagged to any element on the screen anticipated to be clicked-on, swiped, tapped etc., basically, any element which is set to be interact-able by the user.

What is Interaction Design?

Interaction Design is portrayed as the essence of maintaining a flawless and meaningful relationship between the user and the digital products/services/environments or systems.  Unlike user experience design, which correlates the aspects of a system to be faced by the users, Interaction Design deals with facilitating smooth interaction between the users and the screen.

Inevitabilities the complete Interaction Design:

Interaction Design, unlike the conventional design methodology, is not about visually portraying the capabilities of the product or service in question, but, satisfying the desires and specific requirements of the end-users. To achieve this peak, it’s inevitable to consider a conglomerate of factors.

Goal- driven design:

Goal driven design methodology is crafted towards prompting the end user to take an action in the favour of business. The golden rule tagged to such a methodology is to give priority to the design first rather than the coding part.  The design should also feature the specs of a single product rather than addressing them in bulk and it is also ideal to assign the responsibility of product quality and satisfaction to the designers.

Usability:

Usability is something most of the designers miss out when crafting their product or services. It is widely advised to adopt a design approach by criticizing, questioning your own designs as the work progresses. This is something that would enable you to put yourself on the end-user’s shoes, which in turn will help you to spawn peerless user experience.

Cognitive psychology:

This can seem a bit out there, but it is an essential entity that bolsters Interaction Design. Cognitive psychology is the study of behavior process of the mind, like how it works, how it perceives information and the potential focal points.  Test like A/B tests can be rooted back to the cognitive psychology. One of the significances of the cognitive psychology is that, the results from the pertinent studies can be utilized for crafting systems that the end users find intuitive.

Bonus tips:

When it comes to crafting system with interactive elements, you can put some additional thoughts to the following factors, question yourself to find the right solutions.

Ask yourself about the user action limits, like what they could use with mouse, finger etc. and match the results to the versatility of your interface like the button prompts, popups, drag and drop feature etc. Anticipating user actions and the commands they would use.

Providing the end user with clues about the behaviour prior to actions is a brilliant move to keep the users in the loop. With such a step, you are literally pin-pointing what the user can expect when they take an action and this facilitates user system interaction.

Craft creative bounce pages to ensure that users are given the info on what went wrong and how they can recover. It is also advised to work on the response time and the system feedback. Once an action is performed and the system is working on it, it is ideal to let the users know what is happening, this can turn out to be crucial for user engagement.

It’s no longer about web alone, mobile has been stealing the show and it’s even expected that it will take it away from the web soon. Think twice prior to planning elements to be placed on each of the page. For instance, the ‘Sign Up’ button on your page might be proportional to the page when loaded on a desktop, but it might not be the case when the same page is loaded over a phone. Consider these factors for offering seamless interactions.

To sum up, keep the user perspective in mind while adhering to the ‘learnability’ factor. Ensure that everything at the user’s end is maintained as simplified as possible. I hope this article offers an informative insight to into interaction design. Nevertheless, I would love to read comments from both the category of people, please feel free to share your comments below.

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