Interaction design

Interaction design, often abbreviated as IxD, is "the practice of designing interactive digital products, environments, systems, and services." While interaction design has an interest in form (similar to other design fields), its main area of focus rests on behavior. Interaction design is "concerned with dialogues that extend across both the material and the virtual and involve control and representation technologies". Interaction designers are experts in working with design complexity as they typically work on problems that have many possible users, in many possible contexts, to create software with many possible states. Widely used interaction design tools (like Figma or Adobe XD) can be understood as providing interaction designers with a way of managing the complexity. but it took 10 years before the concept started to take hold. To Moggridge, it was an improvement over soft-face, which he had coined in 1984 to refer to the application of industrial design to products containing software.

The earliest programs in design for interactive technologies were the Visible Language Workshop, started by Muriel Cooper at MIT in 1975, and the Interactive Telecommunications Program founded at NYU in 1979 by Martin Elton and later headed by Red Burns.

The first academic program officially named "Interaction Design" was established at Carnegie Mellon University in 1994, as a Master of Design in Interaction Design. At the outset, the program focused mainly on screen interfaces, before shifting to a greater emphasis on the "big picture" aspects of interaction—people, organizations, culture, service and system.

In 1990, Gillian Crampton Smith founded the Computer-Related Design MA at the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London, which in 2005 was renamed Design Interactions, headed by Anthony Dunne. In 2001, Crampton Smith helped found the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea (IDII), a specialized institute in Olivetti's hometown in Northern Italy, dedicated solely to interaction design. In 2007, after IDII closed due to a lack of funding, some of the people originally involved with IDII set up the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (CIID), in Denmark. After Ivrea, Crampton Smith and Philip Tabor added the Interaction Design (IxD) track in the Visual and Multimedia Communication at the Università Iuav di Venezia, Italy.

In 1998, the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research founded The Interactive Institute—a Swedish research institute in the field of interaction design.

Methodologies

Goal-oriented design

Goal-oriented design (or Goal-Directed design) "is concerned with satisfying the needs and desires of the users of a product or service." The problems with designing computer interfaces are fundamentally different from those that do not include software (e.g., hammers). Cooper introduces the concept of cognitive friction, which is when the interface of a design is complex and difficult to use, and behaves inconsistently and unexpectedly, possessing different modes. that describes how usable the interface is. Shneiderman proposes principles for designing more usable interfaces called "Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design"—which are well-known heuristics for creating usable systems.

Personas

Personas are archetypes that describe the various goals and observed behaviour patterns among users.

A persona encapsulates critical behavioural data in a way that both designers and stakeholders can understand, remember, and relate to. Personas use storytelling to engage users' social and emotional aspects, which helps designers to either visualize the best product behaviour or see why the recommended design is successful. provides a vocabulary to evaluate and modify design solutions. Cognitive dimensions offer a lightweight approach to analysis of a design quality, rather than an in-depth, detailed description. They provide a common vocabulary for discussing notation, user interface or programming language design.

Dimensions provide high-level descriptions of the interface and how the user interacts with it: examples include consistency, error-proneness, hard mental operations, viscosity and premature commitment. These concepts aid the creation of new designs from existing ones through design maneuvers that alter the design within a particular dimension.

Affective interaction design

Designers must be aware of elements that influence user emotional responses. For instance, products must convey positive emotions while avoiding negative ones. Other important aspects include motivational, learning, creative, social and persuasive influences. One method that can help convey such aspects is for example, the use of dynamic icons, animations and sound to help communicate, creating a sense of interactivity. Interface aspects such as fonts, color palettes and graphical layouts can influence acceptance. Studies showed that affective aspects can affect perceptions of usability. and McCarthy and Wright's Technology as Experience framework.

Five dimensions

The concept of dimensions of interaction design were introduced in Moggridge's book Designing Interactions. Crampton Smith wrote that interaction design draws on four existing design languages, 1D, 2D, 3D, 4D.

Words

This dimension defines interactions: words are the element that users interact with.

Visual representations

Visual representations are the elements of an interface that the user perceives; these may include but are not limited to "typography, diagrams, icons, and other graphics".

Physical objects or space

This dimension defines the objects or space "with which or within which users interact".

Time

The time during which the user interacts with the interface. An example of this includes "content that changes over time such as sound, video or animation".

Behavior

Behavior defines how users respond to the interface. Users may have different reactions in this interface.

Interaction Design Association

The Interaction Design Association was created in 2003 to serve the community. The organization has over 80,000 members and more than 173 local groups. the annual interaction design conference, and the Interaction Awards. Interaction Awards have since ended in August 2024

;Industrial design

:The core principles of industrial design overlap with those of interaction design. Industrial designers use their knowledge of physical form, color, aesthetics, human perception and desire, and usability to create a fit of an object with the person using it.

;Human factors and ergonomics

:Certain basic principles of ergonomics provide grounding for interaction design. These include anthropometry, biomechanics, kinesiology, physiology and psychology as they relate to human behavior in the built environment.

;Cognitive psychology