Interaction design and the five pillars
What we should look in to when designing products for humans
At the age of information, we are becoming more and more exposed to electronic devices to engage with the society day today and to complete millions of task that we have to do daily. You will be able to find thousands of different types of applications to complete tasks in the market.
We interact with devices from the light switch to nuclear reactors to get our work done. Most of the time we create technologies which are miracles for our age. If the technology we create is unaccessible for humans the purpose of the application obsolete. Making an application understandable and discoverable, the use of interaction design can play a major role.
As product designers, we design solutions for many problems. As same as our lives get complex our problems too. The clients would come to UX designers looking for solutions for their problems. It is UX designers task’s to create meaningful solutions for the problems that are in hand.
Interaction design is the essence of all user experience. It creates a conversation between your product and your user. Understanding how effective is interaction design when coming to the term user experience by the framework below.
This framework created by Dan Saffer shows that Interaction design connects with every aspect of user experience design. Interaction design focus on how people interact with the technology. The main goal of interaction design is to enhance people’s understanding of what can be done, what is happening and what has just occurred. Interaction design created on principles of design, psychology, art, and emotions to create an understandable and meaningful experience to the humans.
What is interaction design?
Interaction design requires art and skills to move beyond the traditional human to computer interface interactions to a more human-centered design where it actually creates a better experience for the user. The interaction design takes human elements, and create a human connection built from the human-computer interaction. Interaction design is knowing how digital technology going to interact with your users.
Why Interaction design matter?
The utmost important thing when designing is to understand and predict how the users going to interact with the system. As product designers, we design system for meeting users end goals. Most of the time we fail to see the connection between the user and the feedback that we would get after being used by the user. Looking at the design in the way how the system would interact, it would help us to get more feedback from the users.
As an example hope everyone has used the coin payphone that was stationed on every corner of the street. As a kid, I always wanted to make a call from the payphone. Whenever I find a coin that I can put, I went to the payphone just to make a call home. I loved that sound when the coin made a noise to make me understand that it was accepted. If the coin fell all the way down it made another noise to make me understand that I should take the coin out since it was rejected.
After some time the payphones were transformed into ones which we had to insert a card to make a call. I was unable to get a proper feedback from the system whether the system has accepted the card or not. When designing the designers of the application has not put much effort in to it.
Even though you have created a application that has latest technology and have the best platform to work on, if the application design has put less effort to communicate with the users, it can very well end-up as a failed product.
In interaction design, the whole concept is seated on five pillars. They are as following.
Goal driven design
Usability
Affordance and significance
Learnability
Feedback and response time
We will look in to each and every pillar separately.
1. Goal driven design
The interaction design should be very people-centric towards the target audience. The goal-driven design focus mainly on satisfying the user needs and goals. In this pillar most of the time technology constrains are considered by the designers but designed in a way to give out optimum output to the user.
Since the main goal is to give solution towards the needs of the user to improve the quality of the output we can always look into following methodologies to conduct user research.
Persona — Persona’s are frictional characters created from the behaviors and psychologies of your target users. Most of the time we create more than one persona to cover all user groups that we have to cover during the research phase.
User Scenarios — User scenarios explain how the persona’s act when interacting with the application. It will tell the designer a story about ho the user is going to achieve his/ her goal by using the application. It will help the designers to understand what motivates the users when interacting with the application.
Experience maps — Experience map is an important tool to understand the product or service from the users point of view. An experience map is basically a visual representation of the user’s needs, wants and expectations and overall experience of the product goal.
2. Usability
Usability refers to the ease of access to the application to the product or service that the user going to be using. Usability provides a valuable contribution to UX. A usable interface has three basic outcomes.
It should be really easy for the user to get familiar with the application with in a relevant short time
It should be really easy for the user to achieve their objective within a reasonable period of time
It should be really easy for the user to recall the user interface and how to use it after subsequent visits
3. Affordance and significance
Affordance is one of the most difficult and most valued objective when come to interaction design. Affordance describes all the actions that are made physically possible by the properties object and environment. In simple the object means what is says to be. Many of the time the users get distracted by actions that confuses them not knowing if it is a action or not. This can happen due to the ability of the user, their past experience, context and beliefs.Correctly applied affordance can reduce the confusion, frustration and quit rate create towards the user by the application and create a better experience to the user.
4. Learnability
Learnability is a measure of degree which a user can learn about the user interface quickly and effectively. The design should be easy to learn in a relevant time with ease. A user interface is easy to learn when it is designed by the core properties of the psychology and when they are familiar to them. When communicating with the digital systems the familiarity is hard to come by when comparing to the digital world that they would live in. The design have to be less complex with proper hierarchy so the user don’t have to struggle to get a task done.
Feedback and response time
In interaction design, a good design should always give feedback to the user whenever an action is made. It makes the user feel that there is a satisfaction or alert knowing something has gone wrong. Feedback is a way of your product communicate with your users. Giving feedback would create a trust from the user and help the user to understand patterns in the system. The feedback should appear in a reasonable time. Let’s take an example, when you pay a bill online and wait for the success message and when it gets delayed we feel uncomfortable and stressed. If the time of the response is quicker we feel comfortable and reliable towards the system. A good response and a feedback is a positive factor for a better experience.
Takeaway
The interaction design is a key factor to create a better experience. There are many tech-savvy applications in use today. But little has been done to improve the communication between the system and the user of the application. As designers, if we can look more into the Interaction design we can create a better world where we have to worry little about frustration, stress and giving up.
