Let’s get to know about Interaction design from scratch!
Let’s consider the situation.
Anne, a student eager to learn, decided to explore a new online course on a platform offering a wide range of options. Excited, she navigated through the site and selected her course. However, she quickly became frustrated as there were no indicators or checkpoints showing her progress. The process of submitting assignments was equally daunting, with no confirmation that her assignments were uploaded or graded. This lack of feedback led her to lose interest, resulting in procrastination and eventually discontinuing the course. It’s common for people to abandon tasks that don’t provide a sense of accomplishment or satisfaction. Anne’s interactions with the platform were neither pleasant nor intuitive, making her experience confusing and unenjoyable.
Problems Anne Faced:
1. Lack of Progress Indicators:
No checkpoints to show how far she had progressed in the course.ani
2. Assignment Submission Confusion:
Unclear if her assignments were uploaded or graded.
3. Loss of Interest:
The confusing interface led to procrastination and eventual discontinuation of the course
So, let’s break it down a little bit. What is a good interaction? Have you ever come across a situation where your content is not loading in the mobile application, and you pull down the screen to refresh it or a situation where you’re searching for a place in Google map, and you pinch to zoom in to a specific area you want to. The interaction is easy and smooth. Now imagine, the option for zooming was just buttons where you have to click to zoom in and out, this interaction requires you to click several times and since the map is huge, locating a specific place would require a lot of time. That would be a good example to define the importance of a good user interaction. All the applications have a set of different interactions that would ultimately affect the user experience. Now as we have an understanding about what a good interaction is, Let’s get to know few of the basic principles which is usually used!
So how can we define an interaction?
The communication or reaction between two or more people or things.
The interaction between people and digital products is what we’re going to be focusing on here. Animations, colors, sound, space and so on are part of interaction Manipulating and presenting the elements in a way it provides a smooth user experience is the goal. Making the interaction more responsive in a more humanlike way in terms of emotional connection with the users. Good interactions lead to positive user experiences.
Related Article : UX Strategies
Basic principles of Interaction design
Goal driven approach
Rather than focusing on just the product or the feature, considering the user needs, motivations and their expectations while they interact with the product. It also involves researching who the product is for, the user persona, scenarios and the things that would portray and define the user’s goals and needs.
Visibility
A good interaction design would provide all the necessary information. The information is to be presented in such a way that it is easy to understand how to use the product and where to navigate and interact with the product. Considering Miller’s law, the memory span of people would accommodate approximately just seven items, so it is better if all the required information is already present for the user to view rather than requiring them to search for it. No one likes confusing UI with the necessary contents hidden from sight.
Feedback
Feedback is the response from the product. When a user interacts with the product, be it any UI element, the system must respond so that the user knows the action was valid. The feedback can be sound, transition or animation. This helps in keeping the user informed that the product is working, and they’re taken to the relevant consequent step. Loading animation when you’ve started the process ensures that the process you’ve started is in progress.
Constraints
Constraints are the limitations set in the interaction to guide the users in the right direction and the interaction would be in an efficient manner. Limiting the number of choices to choose from is one of the constraints, when you have so many choices in a store, you go through it all analyzing and thinking which would take extra time in comparison to when you have limited choices.
Mapping
Making the navigation within the product easier. Placing elements in places where it is easy to guess intuitively. Making the interactions natural for the users to ensure a smooth user experience.
Consistency
The interactions should be consistent with the interactions users have known before so that the users wouldn’t feel confused when interacting with the product. Furthermore, the screens within the product itself has to be consistent with each other.
Good usability
How well can the users use the product. It also depends on how easily the users can navigate through the interfaces. Good usability includes
Learnability- How easy is it for a new user to learn how to interact with the product
Efficiency- How quickly users are able to perform different tasks.
Error rate- While the users are using and interacting with the product, how often are
errors made.
Error recovery- How fast are the users able to recover from the errors they made.
Affordance
The possibility of action on an object. Affordances hint how the feature is supposed to be used. Making it clear on how the UI elements are being used.
Cognition
Understanding cognitive psychology so that the interactions can be designed in such a way that it doesn’t overload the mental capacity of the users.
In conclusion, facilitating interaction between man and machine and making it more accessible for the users, Interaction design plays a major role in ensuring the users effectively achieve their goals. It helps in shaping the digital experiences in a seamless manner, adding value to the user-centric approach. In short, interaction design is about empathizing with the user, anticipating their needs, and designing with a purpose that would elevate the user experience. So, use interactions in a way it is more pleasant and seamless.
