Interaction design, often abbreviated as IxD, is "the practice of designing interactive digital products, environments, systems, and services." Beyond the digital aspect, interaction design is also useful when creating physical (non-digital) products, exploring how a user might interact with it. Common topics of interaction design include

design A design is a plan or specification for the construction of an object or system or for the implementation of an activity or process or the result of that plan or specification in the form of a prototype, product, or process. The verb ''to design' ...

human–computer interaction Human–computer interaction (HCI) is research in the design and the use of computer technology, which focuses on the interfaces between people (users) and computers. HCI researchers observe the ways humans interact with computers and design te ...

, and software development. While interaction design has an interest in form (similar to other design fields), its main area of focus rests on behavior. Rather than analyzing how things are, interaction design synthesizes and imagines things as they could be. This element of interaction design is what characterizes IxD as a design field as opposed to a science or engineering field. While disciplines such as software engineering have a heavy focus on designing for technical stakeholders, interaction design is focused on meeting the needs and optimizing the experience of users, within relevant technical or business constraints.

History

The term ''interaction design'' was coined by

Bill Moggridge William Grant Moggridge, RDI (25 June 1943 – 8 September 2012) was an English designer, author and educator who cofounded the design company IDEO and was director of the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York. He was a pionee ...

and

Bill Verplank William "Bill" Lawrence Verplank is a designer and researcher who focuses on interactions between humans and computers. He is one of the pioneers of interaction design, a field of design that focuses on users and technology, and a term he helped c ...

in the mid-1980s, but it took 10 years before the concept started to take hold. To Verplank, it was an adaptation of the computer science term ''user interface design'' for the industrial design profession. 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 Muriel Cooper (1925 – May 26, 1994) was a pioneering book designer, digital designer, researcher, and educator. She was the first design director of the MIT Press, instilling a Bauhaus-influenced design style into its many publications. She move ...

at MIT in 1975, and the

Interactive Telecommunications Program The New York University Tisch School of the Arts (commonly referred to as Tisch) is the performing, cinematic and media arts school of New York University. Founded on August 17, 1965, Tisch is a training ground for artists, scholars of the ar ...

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 Gillian Crampton Smith is a British educator, interaction designer, and a pioneer of computer desktop publishing. Since the early 1980s she has developed several academic graduate programs focused on digital graphic design, typesetting and huma ...

founded the Computer-related Design MA at the

Royal College of Art The Royal College of Art (RCA) is a public research university in London, United Kingdom, with campuses in South Kensington, Battersea and White City. It is the only entirely postgraduate art and design university in the United Kingdom. It o ...

(RCA) in London, changed in 2005 to Design Interactions, headed by Anthony Dunne. In 2001, Crampton Smith helped found the

Interaction Design Institute Ivrea Interaction Design Institute Ivrea (also known as Interaction Ivrea or IDII) was a two-year graduate program in the field of Interaction Design operating in the town of Ivrea, in Northern Italy. It was based in the former Olivetti Study and Res ...

, a small institute in Olivetti's hometown in Northern Italy, dedicated solely to interaction design. The institute moved to Milan in October 2005 and merged with

Domus Academy Domus Academy is a private school of design in Milan, Italy. It offers post-graduate and professional courses in fashion, industrial design, and design management. It is not listed by the Ministero dell'Istruzione, dell'Università e della Rice ...

. In 2007, some of the people originally involved with IDII set up the

Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design The Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (CIID) is a postgraduate school and consultancy based in Copenhagen, Denmark and San Jose, Costa Rica, which focuses on the domain of interaction design. History The Copenhagen Institute of Interac ...

(CIID). After Ivrea, Crampton Smith and Philip Tabor added the Interaction Design (IxD) track in the Visual and Multimedia Communication at Iuav,

University of Venice Ca' Foscari University of Venice ( it, Università Ca' Foscari Venezia, simply Università Ca' Foscari) is a public university in Venice, Italy. Since its foundation in 1868, it has been housed in the Venetian Gothic palace of Ca' Foscari, from ...

, Italy, between 2006 and 2014. In 1998, the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research founded

The Interactive Institute The Interactive Institute (also known as Interactive Institute Swedish ICT) is an experimental research institute in the fields of information and communications technology, interaction design, and visualization, operating in Sweden. The Interact ...

—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." Alan Cooper argues in ''The Inmates Are Running the Asylum'' that we need a new approach to solving interactive software-based problems. 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. Alternatively, interfaces can be designed to serve the needs of the service/product provider. User needs may be poorly served by this approach.

Usability

Usability answers the question "can someone use this interface?". Jakob Nielsen describes usability as the quality attribute 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 A persona (plural personae or personas), depending on the context, is the public image of one's personality, the social role that one adopts, or simply a fictional character. The word derives from Latin, where it originally referred to a theatri ...

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.

Cognitive dimensions

The

cognitive dimensions Cognitive dimensions or cognitive dimensions of notations are design principles for notations, user interfaces and programming languages, described by researcher Thomas R.G. Green and further researched with Marian Petre. The dimensions can be ...

framework 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 In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine f ...

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. Emotion and pleasure theories exist to explain interface responses. These include Don Norman's emotional design model, Patrick Jordan's pleasure model 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. Silver later proposed a fifth dimension, behaviour.

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. IxDA hosts Interaction the annual interaction design conference, and the Interaction Awards.

Related disciplines

; Industrial design :The core principles of industrial design overlap with those of interaction design. Industrial designers use their knowledge of physical

form Form is the shape, visual appearance, or configuration of an object. In a wider sense, the form is the way something happens. Form also refers to: *Form (document), a document (printed or electronic) with spaces in which to write or enter data ...

, color,

aesthetics Aesthetics, or esthetics, is a branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of beauty and taste, as well as the philosophy of art (its own area of philosophy that comes out of aesthetics). It examines aesthetic values, often expressed t ...

human perception Perception () is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment. All perception involves signals that go through the nervous system ...

and desire, and usability to create a fit of an object with the person using it. ;

Human factors and ergonomics Human factors and ergonomics (commonly referred to as human factors) is the application of psychological and physiological principles to the engineering and design of products, processes, and systems. Four primary goals of human factors learnin ...

:Certain basic principles of ergonomics provide grounding for interaction design. These include

anthropometry Anthropometry () refers to the measurement of the human individual. An early tool of physical anthropology, it has been used for identification, for the purposes of understanding human physical variation, in paleoanthropology and in various at ...

biomechanics Biomechanics is the study of the structure, function and motion of the mechanical aspects of biological systems, at any level from whole organisms to organs, cells and cell organelles, using the methods of mechanics. Biomechanics is a branch of ...

kinesiology Kinesiology () is the scientific study of human body movement. Kinesiology addresses physiological, anatomical, biomechanical, pathological, neuropsychological principles and mechanisms of movement. Applications of kinesiology to human healt ...

physiology Physiology (; ) is the scientific study of functions and mechanisms in a living system. As a sub-discipline of biology, physiology focuses on how organisms, organ systems, individual organs, cells, and biomolecules carry out the chemical ...

and

psychology Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Psychology includes the study of conscious and unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts. It is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries between ...

as they relate to human behavior in the built environment. ; Cognitive psychology :Certain basic principles of cognitive psychology provide grounding for interaction design. These include

mental model A mental model is an explanation of someone's thought process about how something works in the real world. It is a representation of the surrounding world, the relationships between its various parts and a person's intuitive perception about thei ...

s, mapping, interface metaphors, and

affordance Affordance is what the environment offers the individual. American psychologist James J. Gibson coined the term in his 1966 book, ''The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems'', and it occurs in many of his earlier essays. However, his best-know ...

s. Many of these are laid out in

Donald Norman Donald Arthur Norman (born December 25, 1935) is an American researcher, professor, and author. Norman is the director of The Design Lab at University of California, San Diego. He is best known for his books on design, especially '' The Design ...

's influential book ''

The Design of Everyday Things ''The Design of Everyday Things'' is a best-selling book by cognitive scientist and usability engineer Donald Norman about how design serves as the communication between object and user, and how to optimize that conduit of communication in order ...

.'' ;

Human–computer interaction Human–computer interaction (HCI) is research in the design and the use of computer technology, which focuses on the interfaces between people (users) and computers. HCI researchers observe the ways humans interact with computers and design te ...

:Academic research in human–computer interaction (HCI) includes methods for describing and testing the usability of interacting with an interface, such as

and the

cognitive walkthrough The cognitive walkthrough method is a usability inspection method used to identify usability issues in interactive systems, focusing on how easy it is for new users to accomplish tasks with the system. A cognitive walkthrough is task-specific, wher ...

. ;

Design research Design research was originally constituted as primarily research into the process of design, developing from work in design methods, but the concept has been expanded to include research embedded within the process of design, including work concer ...

:Interaction designers are typically informed through iterative cycles of user research. User research is used to identify the needs, motivations and behaviors of end users. They

with an emphasis on user goals and experience, and evaluate designs in terms of usability and affective influence. ;

Architecture Architecture is the art and technique of designing and building, as distinguished from the skills associated with construction. It is both the process and the product of sketching, conceiving, planning, designing, and constructing building ...

:As interaction designers increasingly deal with

ubiquitous computing Ubiquitous computing (or "ubicomp") is a concept in software engineering, hardware engineering and computer science where computing is made to appear anytime and everywhere. In contrast to desktop computing, ubiquitous computing can occur using ...

urban informatics Urban informatics refers to the study of people creating, applying and using information and communication technology and data in the context of cities and urban environments. It sits at the conjunction of urban science, geomatics, and informatics ...

and urban computing, the architects' ability to make, place, and create context becomes a point of contact between the disciplines. ;

User interface design User interface (UI) design or user interface engineering is the design of user interfaces for machines and software, such as computers, home appliances, mobile devices, and other electronic devices, with the focus on maximizing usability and the ...

:Like user interface design and

experience design User experience design (UX design, UXD, UED, or XD) is the process of defining the experience a user would go through when interacting with a digital product or website. Design decisions in UX design are often driven by research, data analysis, an ...

, interaction design is often associated with the design of system interfaces in a variety of media but concentrates on the aspects of the interface that define and present its behavior over time, with a focus on developing the system to respond to the user's experience and not the other way around.