What is interaction design?

I really hear interface design and interaction design get thrown around. How different is it then web design? If it has a whole field and job title to go along with it, it must be very unique.

I was so curious about it that I decided to get a book on it recently. The book is “Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design” by Jenifer Tidwell. Nice little book I got off Amazon to read on my spare time.

I haven’t finished the book yet, but I have gotten almost half through it, so I think I have a pretty good understanding of the gist of how it works.

Interaction design deals as much as with websites as it does for operating systems(Windows), mobile devices (iPhone), and game sytems ( Nintendo Wii ).

Websites have all kinds of “features” that we think about when we design a site. We know their browser will have a  back button, they can resize the window,or have a mouse and keyboard that they can use to navigate. We take that knowledge and create a global navigation, breadcrumbs, and bookmarks for the site.  The process of how we navigate a system and is called a mental model.

The web has certain mental models with how people expect things to behave. Cell phones and operating systems have different mental models - and there is also some overlap. Designig with these mental models in mind makes things “intuitive”.

A lot of devices and systems don’t have the luxury of having a mouse or other user input device like a phone. Content is organized differently based on different user constraints that the device has. This is where learning about the different concepts and patterns are helpful.

Why this is important for a web designer

Why is this important for web designer to know?  As web technologies mesh with mobile and desktop applications, it is going to be important that we know how to design for different devices.

If you find out that 35% of your web traffic is coming from a mobile phone, are you going to know how to update your design to make them have a good experience as well?

With the mobile web, there is such an emphasis on just making sure that it fits in their little browser window. This isn’t the optimal solution. The site’s entire information architecture needs to be reorganized so people can get the information they need without having to think.

If you know cell phone design principles and the corresponding mental models, you can use them and incorporate them into your mobile site design. Using concepts such as “hub and spoke” and one window drilldowns will make a mobile experience considerably better.

It sounds important to me for the future of web/mobile design, so I think I will invest more time into learning about the subject.