Creating a Good Interaction Design

Design is all about enhancing the way people work and communicate. Designing interactive product requires considering who is going to use it and how. Think for a moment… how many interactive products you use in a day? Mobile phone, Microwave, Car, ATM, Television. How many products do you like to use which are hard to understand? Now this is where an Interaction designer’s role starts. Interaction designer needs to have an understanding of their business and the requirements of their customers.

The main concern of Interaction designers is to develop interactive products which are usable and easily acceptable by users. To start with we need to identify the weaknesses and strengths of different interactive systems thus we can begin to understand what it means for something to usable or not. Designing usable products thus requires a designer to understand who is going to use it and what will be the use of the product. Another key point is to understand the kind of activities people will do while interacting with the product.

Interaction designer should think around optimizing the user’s interaction with a system, environment or product to match user’s activities. You can also use basic principles of Interaction design and can also involve users to make better choices. This will involve–

• To identify what people are good and bad at,
• Considering what might help people with the way they currently do things,
• Thinking innovative ways to provide quality user experiences,
• Involve users to understand what people,
• Using “tried and tested” user-based techniques.

Essentially, the process of Interaction design involves few basic activities–

• Identifying the needs of users and establishing the requirements,
• Create alternative design meeting those requirements,
• Creating different versions of your design which can be compared and assessed,
• Evaluating what has been designed in effort to meet the requirements.

There are few basic goals of a good design which designers should stick with–

• Effective usage,
• Easy to learn,
• Easy to remember,
• Useful.

Usability.... Waste or Important?

In the era where technologies are seeking new comforts for consumers/users. Is it worthwhile to design a product without keeping in mind user's acceptance? Is the poorly designed interfaces are the reason why so many products are never used? Will the poorly designed products have any future?

Mr. Gaurav Awasthi, Mass Communication student says - While surfing few shopping and job sites he had a terrible experience to locate the relevant links to manage his account. Are these sites designed in accordance to user's skills, experience and expectations?

The competition is growing rapidly and users are getting more and more options everyday. So in this scenario will the companies giving least priority to user experience can have a wider reach?

Few important factors should be taken care of while designing a new product-

• User has limited short term memory
• User are prone to commit mistakes with complex designs
• Different users have different capabilities and skillsets
  
• Users have different preferences and requirements
  
• There should be minimal surprises for user while using a product
• How the information should be served to users

Some suggestion should be taken care while designing-

• UI design process should involve user analysis, system prototype and evaluation.
• UI prototyping should be a staged process with early paper prototypes.
• Colours should be used sparingly maintaining the consistency.

" If Functionality is what technology do, then INTERFACE is how user interacts with it."

- Thanks, Akash Srivastava