How Interaction Design Enhances UI/UX?

In this day and age where the designs are coming closer to the users and emotionally appealing to the users, making a design conversational is a must. This means that the design should be able to convey to the user that taking a particular action would lead to what result. Because of this user can perform their task easily. This is why Interaction Design became popular.

In this article, we will discuss What Interaction Design is. How Interaction Design Enhances UI/UX and Principles for Creating Good Interaction Design.

How Interaction Design Enhances UI/UX?

What is Interaction Design?

Interaction design also known as IxD is a method or way of creating a conversation between the user and the product in such a way it is easy meaningful and interesting. It is all about designing the interaction between users and products. Interaction design is the subset of the user experience design. The ultimate goal of interaction design is to create products that allow users to achieve their objectives in the most efficient way from the product irrespective of the means used (computer, mobile devices, or physical products).

Interaction design is all about creating a meaningful conversation between the user and the product be it physical or digital. One thing that we should note is that Interaction Design is not just physical but also emotional and affects the user’s Psychology, this makes Interaction design an important aspect of the overall user experience.

Example of Interaction Design

Interaction Design can be best understood by the help of an example. Let’s take an example of an atm machine, we use atm machine to get money out of it so your task while using the atm machine is to get money from the atm machine. How can you interact with the atm machine? There can be three possible ways – First is through voice command, Second is by using the keypad on the atm machine and Third would be the touchscreen. Here the most important part of UI/UX designing is to design the interaction between the user and the product. It is the job of the interaction designer to decide what would be the most optimal way of creating the interaction between the user and the product. Furthermore after deciding what would be the best way of interaction between the user and the product it is the job of the interaction designer to decide what would be the action of the user and what would be the reaction of the product, these are called at the moment interactions.

Remember, Interaction designer doesn’t have to really think about what would be the design and the overall design of the product (atm machine in this case). They do not have to think about the aesthetics, the color, the layout and the visuals of the design. What they have to design is those at the moment interaction, what would be the actions from the user and what would be the possible outcomes from the Product if any.

How Interaction Design Enhances UI/UX?

There are multiple ways in which Interaction Design Enhances UI/UX, the most important ways through which Interaction Design Enhances UI/UX design is:

• Grabbing the user’s attention: If the conversation that happens between the design and the user is boring or difficult and user is not able to perform their tasks easily then they would just leave your product and would move on to something else. Interaction Design is all about creating effective interactions which grabs the users attention and makes sure that they stay.
• Makes the design interesting: Interaction design makes the design interesting by providing a way to interact with the user in a more fun manner. Creating fun and interesting interactions makes the product stay in the user’s mind.
• Improves the Consistency of the design: Consistency is keeping design elements uniform throughout the design. This is really important since a inconsistent design looks cluttered and messy, this looks visually unattractive reducing the overall user experience of using the product.
• Creating a Minimalist design: Interaction design helps us remove all the unnecessary elements that do not serve any purpose in the design. This enhances the overall user interface and the experience because now the user only gets the important elements to choose from and does not have to be confused about all that they see on the screens.
• Enhances the Visual appeal: Interactions enhances the overall visual appeal. Using visual interactions in your design makes them look visually appealing and professional. These interactions can be used to appeal to the users emotions and convey our message to the user in more effective manner.

Principles of Interaction Design

The 10 major principles of interaction design are as following:

1. Consistency: As we discussed in the previous section, consistency simply means keeping design elements uniform throughout the design. We can create a consistent design by making sure that the elements we are using in the design look and behave in the same way compared to other elements of the design.
2. Minimalism: By Minimalism we mean that the design should be simple and should not include any blingy or unnecessary elements that do not serve any purpose but are there for the visuals. We can make our design Minimal by keeping it simple, clear and concise.
3. Discoverability: Discoverability means that all the design elements that are important for the user are visible and easily accessible. Discoverability is very important to make any design interactive. While creating Interaction Design, we must make sure that the interactions are easily discoverable for the user.
4. Learnability: By Learnability we mean that the interaction should be easy to learn and remember for the user without facing issues to use it again. If the user comes to our website once and uses a particular feature, he or she must feel comfortable to come again and use the feature easily without having to go though any form of guide.
5. Conceptual and Mental Models: Conceptual and Mental Models are they are extremely important in order to make a design discoverable and easier to understand. A mental model explains how a person thinks about what is going on in this world.
6. Feedback: The design should provide a real response to each action taken by the user. If the user doesn’t get feedback of the actions he or she has performed, it would confuse the user whether his or her task is done or not. Lack of Feedback to user leads to a poor design.
7. Mapping: In design, Mapping is a relationship between two set of things. Mapping represents which control is connected to what action on the product.
8. Visual Hierarchy: Visual Hierarchy is a way of convey the user that which of the information is more important and grab the user’s attention on that information or element of design. If you want your user to put their attention on a particular information then you can highlight it with the help of certain colors or with the help of typography.
9. Affordances and Signifiers: Affordance basically means telling the users what actions he or she can take on a particular element. Signifier while on the other hand tells the user what affordances objects they have.
10. Constraints: We would not want user to do anything and everything with the features we create because this may create confusion in the mind of the user. Constraints is restricting the possibilities of user interaction to make sure that only specific things are visible to user. This is done to take some control from the user and give it to the designers.

Conclusion

Interaction design also known as IxD is a method or way of creating a conversation between the user and the product in such a way it is easy meaningful and interesting. It is all about designing interaction between user and products. A good design is conversational. This means that the user must be able to converse with the design in such a way that the design should be able to convey the user that taking a particular action would lead to what result.