5 Pillars of Interaction Design(IxD) every designer must know about… A very big UX factor…

The term IxD is very much used by designers to complement their designs and sell stuff. It is a big responsibility for designers to understand that IxD is not about making application beautiful on the other hand it has power to make application user centric. It is a very big factor for making great user experience.

IxD is concerned with how user engages with your product. It surrounds around the conversation between the user and the application in every single second. Some generic examples are: global navigation sticks to top when scrolling down to give accessibility to user always. One more example; when user types something in search, it suggests some smart suggestions for better experience. These are just two examples to make you understand how products interact with the user. Many elements fall into this category like buttons, links, forms, navigations, pop-ups, alerts, listings and even whole pages etc. It is the biggest phenomena these days which is followed to make best user experience. If someone of you remembers old public calling booths, we needed to put coins into it for making calls. As we put a coin into the device slot, we heard a satisfying sound click and this was how we knew we could make a call now. The interaction was so good and satisfying.

Note: Some people always misunderstand the exact meaning of IxD, resulting bad user experience of applications following by failure. And some think IxD is like Micro-Interactions which makes beautiful transitions of elements. Micro-Interactions are just a small part of IxD.

Definition of IxD

It is a process which is used to create engaging experience with the help of logical behaviors and actions of element or components. It is based on how application interacts with the user giving maximum value and satisfaction. IxD is truely a main component for creating best user experiences.

Let us check out the main five pillars for Interaction Design:

1. Goal Driven Design

Personas: User research is very important to know the real scenarios and related problems. Who is the actual person who has the problem?

User Stories: What we want to achieve through our persona should be well defined by user stories. User stories give logic to our thoughts making the design perfect.

2. User Expectations

Let’s study human psychology in accordance with newton’s law a bit to know the movie better.

Newton’s third law says: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Human brain is well versed with this law resulting expected reactions to his actions. Let’s dig deeper a bit. For example, if you throw a coin into the air and let it fall on the floor, your brain expects tumbling sounds of coin when it hits the floor. This is the same case when a user comes to a application and performs some actions expecting some reactions from the product. Facebook does a very good job regarding this. In native app if a user taps like icon it gives a very beautiful plup sound giving a satisfying result. User gets to know immediately that he performs some action. Let us see one more case. If a user fills some form and clicks ‘Done’, he expects some confirmation alert or error message if something is wrong with any of the fields. This is what Interaction Design is all about.

3. Usability

There should be less attention to figure out how to use the application so that user can focus on completing the task. Product should be very easy to use and easy to understand its functions.

4. Utility

It is the most important factor focusing on ‘Does user find the function useful?’ or ‘Is the function important or is it designed to give high quality UI factor only?’ The function should solve some problem or purpose then only it is useful to the user. There should be a very logical reasoning behind the function to complete a valuable task.

5. Affordance and Signifier

Function which speaks for itself and suggest its own use is affordance. Signifier hints at the affordance of the particular function and suggests how to use. For example, we see a door it tells us it can be opened. Door speaks for itself that it has a function that it can be opened. And now we look at the door knob which signifies the door opening, supporting affordance and telling how to open the door.