Elements of Interaction Design: How It Works
After exploring the five dimensions of Interaction Design, we need to look at the practice of Interaction Design. This article provides an overview of how interaction designers (that’s what they’re called) leverage the 5 dimensions to create meaningful interactions.
Common Interaction Designer Questions
To create effective user-leaning interactions, interaction designers ask a few questions for a fuller understanding of the user, their perspective, and circumstances. According to Usability.gov, interaction designers commonly ask these questions:
To define the possible user interactions with the product, what can a user do with their finger, mouse, and stylus to directly interact with the interface?
To offer users clues about possible behaviors, what aspect of the color, shape, size, or other appearance can clue a user about how it may function?
To help users anticipate errors and handle errors, do the product’s error messages provide a way for the user to correct the problem or explain why the error happened?
To ensure that the system provides feedback in a reasonable time after user actions, what feedback does a user get after completing an action?
To force strategic thinking about every element of the product, are the interface elements a reasonable size to interact with?
To simplify and enhance the learnability of a product, are you using familiar or standard formats?
The Responsibilities of an Interaction Designer
What does an interaction designer do, anyway? That depends on several factors.
In a big company with ample resources, UX designers are distinct from interaction designers. In a large design team, the organogram may include a UX researcher, an information architect, an interaction designer, and a visual designer.
Smaller companies and teams may have only one or two people doing the bulk of UX design. They won’t necessarily be called “Interaction Designer” even though they’ll naturally perform some of those functions.
It’s important that we identify these routine tasks of interaction designers:
Developing design strategy
This focuses on identifying the user’s goals and the corresponding interactions necessary to achieve them.
Each company’s interaction designers may need to conduct user research to find out users’ goals before creating a strategy that translates into interactions.
Wirefames and prototypes
This depends on each company’s job description. However, most interaction designers must create wireframes to visually lay out the interactions in the product. Sometimes, interaction designers might also create interactive prototypes along with high-fidelity (hi-fi) prototypes that mimic the actual digital product.
In summary, interaction design can be a gamechanger for your app or mobile app. It’s important to see it as a necessary step in product development. Fun fact: most apps you and other users love to use are products of robust interaction design. Find more than 150,000 of these digital products on UILand to see how and why they work for users.
