The term user interface (UI) design and user experience (UX) design should not be too unfamiliar to the designers out there, but the same can’t be said with interaction design (IxD). On today article, we will explain the basic definition of interaction design.
Befitting of its name, interaction design is the act of designing an interaction or communication that will happen between the user and the product. For example, when a user presses a button, what’s the feedback that should be given? Interaction design is one of the important components in the making of a digital product, interaction design also has two types, macro interaction and micro interaction.
The types of interaction design
- Macro Interaction
Macro interaction is the standard interaction that is in an application. An example is when a user presses a back button, the feedback that the app give is a slide of that page to the right before returning to the previous page. On iOS, the interaction to go back to return to a previous page is triggered by a swipe to the right gesture.
2. Micro Interaction
Micro interaction is an additional interaction that gives a helpful and delightful feedback to that application. For example, in Twitter if a user presses the heart button, Twitter will give a delightful, feel-good animation to the user.
Why is interaction design helpful?
Lots of people still underestimate micro interaction with a bunch of excuses such as time limit, too hard to realize, and other excuses. Even when this micro interaction is helpful to increase the user experience of our product. Here are some of the benefits from implementing interaction design:
- Increases a website’s navigation
- Makes it easier for the user to interact with our digital product
- Gives instant and relevant feedback to the user when an action happens.
- Provokes the user to share, gives like, and or interact with the interaction.
- Able to divert the user attention to a desired section.
- Lastly, it makes the design feels more emotional and alive.
Concepts in Interaction Design
- Goal driven design
Interaction design should be people centric towards its target audience. The goal design in it focuses on the satisfaction and the purpose of the user. This is because the main goal for it is to give a solution regarding the user’s demands to increase the quality of the output.
2. Usability
Usability means an easy access in using the product for the user overall.
3. Affordance and significance
Affordance is one of the hardest and most valuable objectives in interaction design. Affordance describes all actions to be made possible through physically or through object properties and the environment.
4. Learnability
Learnability is a way to measure where the user can quickly and effectively learn about the user interface. A design should be able to be studied easily and quickly. A user interface will be easy to understand when designed using this core property.
5. Feedback and response time
In interaction design, a good design should give feedback to the user each time they do an action. Feedback makes the user feel satisfied, but it can also let the user know if there’s something wrong. Giving a feedback will build a strong trust to the user and help them understand the pattern in the system.
That’s a short explanation regarding what interaction design is, its types, and its importance in designing a product. We hope this article will be useful, and if something is not clear, don’t be shy to ask in the comments!
Enjoy!!
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