What an interaction designer actually does.

The interaction designer is not to be confused with a User Experience designer, although UX is a field in the discipline of interaction design. The interaction designer is interested in the customer or user’s, behaviour, or actions when trying to achieve goals in interactive products such as websites, software applications, mobile apps, and robotics. The interaction designer use’s many disciplines and fields, such as usability, accessibility, user research, and different design approaches, to design interactive products.

“Design is not philosophy, design is for life” Issey Miyake

The Interaction designers main focus is the customer, or user. That is the person who uses your interactive product, to reach a goal such as a purchase through an e-commerce shopping based website. The Interaction designer, then creates a design taking into account the behaviour’s of the customer as the customer, or user, reaches a desired goal lets say the purchase of a rugby ball.  Another goal for the customer during a purchase on the e-commerce based shopping site could be the customer downloading an application they have purchased onto a tablet device.

So why is this useful to my company?

If your a business, or organisation that has an interactive product I want you to think back to times when you have found what you thought was a straightforward process has proven difficult for customers to understand. It happens often in business that we think we know our customers, but do we without proper user research? For interactive products, interaction designs focus on user behaviour and can help you reduce problems, or refocus design’s, and interactive products which are not meeting your customers needs, or could be further improved. 

“We must design for the way people behave,
not for how we would wish them to behave.”

Donald A. Norman, Living with Complexity

Use interaction design for times when you need to understand how different targeted customer segments (the users from your business, organisation, or target market),  will use your interactive product, before investing heavily in further development costs, pr, or market research.

“A beautiful product that doesn’t work very well is ugly.”
Jony Ive

Where does interaction design differ from HCI?

Interaction design has a wider perspective for design of any technology, systems or products compared to Human Computer Interaction (HCI)

Ixdlab have been using interaction design for a while on many different projects for household names with much aplumb. Call us to find out more.

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