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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What does a user experience designer do?

User experience designers, design interactive product’s and experience from the perspective of the customers who use the interactive product’s, rather than designing purely on use of functionality. For that you need usability. But UX (User Experience) design also borrow’s from usability too.

The idea behind user experience design is that the UX designer create’s pleasing, but usable designs for interactive products that improve the satisfaction of customers who want to use the interactive product.

The UX designer puts together aspects of an interactive products design. Don’t get UX design confused with branding, graphic design, or UI. UX designers may touch on these areas to put a design together. But is UI, UX?, or Brand UX? or Graphic design UX? In the singular sense. No. It isn’t.

“We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.” 
Jeff Bezos, Amazon.

UX exists to design for the customers users experiences when using an interactive product, they, the customers are king, they know what they want, need, require:

“When a customer enters my store, forget me. He is king.”
John Wanamaker, Early American pioneer of Marketing, and Business Entrepreneur

Customers do not use interactive products in the same way as one another, or exactly like developers, or a director of a company, or an organisation does. Every customer is unique. Every customer uses your product for a reason. If the customer cannot get what they want from your interactive product in a reasonable manner no matter how good it is, its likely that, they, the customer will go elsewhere. This is why UX design’s, with the understanding of the customer.

UX designers need to consider in designs all stages of the interactive products life-cycle. From first contact with the customer, to how they access help. How the interactive product is maintained, and further iterated. UX design however is not a replacement for Service Design.

Most UX designers will implement typography that’s nice looking fonts sized perfectly for each interactive products interface, but they won’t design the typeface.

UX designers may work with content designers, brand designers, Marketing, and technical disciplines to create a successful interactive product. The UX designer never walks alone.

Some of the tools of the UX designers trade: Storyboarding, Wireframing, Prototyping, Typography, Sketch, InVision and Agile to name some of the most popular methods of creating a new interactive products design.

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