Design: Interaction Design

My last column, “Specifying Behavior,” focused on the importance of interaction designers’ taking full responsibility for designing and clearly communicating the behavior of product user interfaces. At the conclusion of the Design Phase for a product release, interaction designers’ provide key design deliverables that play a crucial role in ensuring their solutions to design problems actually get built. These deliverables might take the form of high-fidelity, interactive prototypes; detailed storyboards that show every state of a user interface in sequence; detailed, comprehensive interaction design specifications; or some combination of these. Whatever form they take, producing these interaction design deliverables is a fundamental part of a successful product design process.

In this installment of On Good Behavior, I’ll provide an overview of a product design process, then discuss some indispensable activities that are part of an effective design process, with a particular focus on those activities that are essential for good interaction design. Although this column focuses primarily on activities that are typically the responsibility of interaction designers, this discussion of the product design process applies to all aspects of UX design. Read More

In March of 2011, I joined HP to lead the User Experience and Front-End Development organization for Consumer Travel. My goal? To design products that transform the future of travel. At the time, eleven UX professionals had already been working on the design for one of our travel applications for several months. Unfortunately, I had to throw the entire design away and start from scratch. Why? In addition to other challenges, the team could not articulate an interaction model. Read More

This is an excerpt from Stephen P. Anderson and Karl Fast’s book Figure It Out: Getting From Information to Understanding. 2020, Rosenfeld Media.

Chapter 11: A Pattern Language for Talking About Interactions

Epistemic actions are … a mechanism for spreading cognitive processes across brain, body, and the world. They allow us to see wildly different behaviors as serving the same cognitive purpose. …

In this chapter, we are going to describe a suite of epistemic interactions that people use to create meaning, solve problems, make decisions, establish plans, analyze information, and do other cognitively complex tasks. Taken together, they serve as a versatile vocabulary for describing how people figure things out, … an invaluable framework for pinpointing the underlying cognitive work that drives the understanding process. …

Our interaction vocabulary … provides a way to separate the visual trappings of our digital world—windows, menus, and scrollbars—from the essence of how we interact to figure things out. Moreover, these interactions are not tied, in any way, to a particular technology. They can also be used to describe how we create understanding with paper-based technologies, or virtual reality, or any other technology—even ones that have yet to be invented. … Read More