What is an interaction designer?

Interaction Design facilitates interactions between people and their environment, which in our case it is technology(web/mobile). Interaction designers are only concerned with how users and computers interact, unlike UX designers who take into account all user-facing aspects of the product. You might have heard the term “human-computer interactions” tossed around the office or in design discussions— if you want to learn it for free at Stanford here you go .

“The best designers developed deep understanding in common sense that surpasses the average users comprehension”

Where to start

First understand your new role as an interaction designer(or current IXD role) you have been hired to make products sing and dance so the people(users)laugh and have fun. Understand that no one is expecting you to start a new trend or challenge the product design strategy(if you do that’s great, I’m buying stock in you today) those big “Ahhhha” moments will come later in your career, so relax and take a deep breath.

“Their are no elevators to amazing design, only stairs with giant steps”

Understand the users

Take the time to understand your users in great detail, don’t just hide in your office behind all the user data you’re collecting, get out and chat with your users and develop empathy for them. Great designers use design intuition mixed with collected data to make design decisions that will help iterate the design strategy for that product. If you’re in a larger company its a good chance you have a design researcher arm to work with that can help you with early user research.

Sketch and iterate

Its time to get things down on paper grab some markers and a sketch book or white board. Don’t focus on visuals right now, focus on how you want the user to interact with your product on web/mobile/TV..etc what is the easiest way to get the user from A to Z or from browsing to buying..etc. Don’t focus heavily on the mico-interactions yet until you nail your core interactions first. Much like animation, the core animated movements must be done first then focus on in-between key-frames, same principal applies to IxD.

Create a interaction map(flow)of each path a user could take for each experience. for instance what would the user sign up flow look like? how many entry points to a users profile? It’s your job to figure this out and make it easy, If I click the sign up button where will I end up in your website?

Get feedback from peers and potential users at this point in the design, it will make things smoother later. Don’t waste time getting feedback on things that are common sense and might be considered design trends, test them on the things that required a deeper thought processing from you in the initial design stages.(sticky spots)

Start looking for patterns in your design, or patterns in user behavior by the people you got feed back from. Now start making iterations on the design and rinse and repeat. Try creating a higher fidelity prototype when refining the user testing experience to match closer to the envisioned product experience, this will also yield different results in the next testing exercise. Every time you test you should be making your design better and feeling closer to how you want users to interact with the product.

Constant dialog

Give them constant feedback and keep them in context as much as you can, telling the user they did something right or wrong will hold value, even if only at the unconscious level. The user should never need to guess, let them know they have options and never navigate them to a dead zone(no way back) if this happens you failed your mission.

Use page layout and visual hierarchies to help users accomplish their goals within your product, guide the eyes. Each step should follow the previous and try to be predictable in progressive steps to achieve superior interaction design and UX.(keep it natural)

If you want to go for innovation, you will still need known and understood patterns. But if you go for great usability, nobody ever will encourage you to reinvent the wheel, as this takes time for the users to get used to and requires “buy-in”.

More coming soon.. I wish we could make collaborative posts I would love to get all of you adding stuff.. If you add it in comments I will make them public..

Thank you