Interaction Design
AI-assisted summary
Interaction design focuses on creating usable interactive products that align with users' abilities and needs while achieving key goals like effectiveness, efficiency, and learnability. The discipline recognizes that even seemingly minor micro-interactions can significantly impact users' overall satisfaction with a product, necessitating careful consideration of both technical usability and broader user experience concerns.
Building upon interaction science principles, effective interaction design transcends mere usability by acknowledging that technically proficient products can still fail if they incorporate dark patterns or conflict with users' mental models. The field's central challenge lies in creating intuitive interfaces where a product's conceptual model closely matches users' existing mental models of how a system should work, potentially requiring targeted training when introducing completely novel concepts.
- A central concern of interaction design is to develop interactive products that are usable
- Using appropriate formats for specific target groups is essential
- e.g. short videos for young, podcasts for middle-aged and print for older people with the same content
- Should take into consideration users' Ability
- Usability
- Ensuring that products are easy to learn, effective to use and enjoyable from user's perspective
- Focuses on achieving key 6 usability goals
- Micro interactions can have a big impact on overall perceived satisfaction with a product
- We should focus more on user experience than on usability. Super usable product with dark patterns will rank low in user experience
- Builds on top of interaction science
- Focuses on understanding principles and mechanisms between people, groups of people and technological systems
- Main aim is to develop theories, models and insights describing how people interact with technologies and systems
- The secret to designing an intuitive user experience is making sure that the conceptual model of your product matches, as much as possible, the mental model of your audience
- If you have a brand new product that you know will not match anyone's mental model, you'll need to provide training to prepare people to create a new mental model.