When it comes to your own life, you’re an amazing interaction designer.
So much so, in fact, that you can do it multiple times before you’ve even finished your first coffee of the day. Think: when you sit down at your desk and put the cup on the other side of the table to avoid knocking it onto your computer. Or when you message your friends with a choice between only three restaurants for your Friday meetup – instead of asking them to pick absolutely anywhere they can think of. Or even when you put your cup in the sink to remind yourself to wash it later.
In all these moments, you’re designing interactions. And you don’t need to be a professional to design for yourself. But if you’re responsible for creating products and services for other people, you might need a more strategic approach.
Interaction Design, or IxD, has been around a long time. It’s a crucial, , part of the process of creating a great product or service. Essentially, IxD is about deliberately designing a key moment when a person interacts with something in order to improve their experience or create a particular outcome. Like making it easier to choose a restaurant or remember to do the dishes. You might hear that IxD is mostly associated with digital solutions, but it is really useful for physical products too.
IxD is one of those funny things that we tend to only notice when it creates a bad experience (like those prompts to get you to buy insurance on travel websites). But done well – and especially when it’s done in combination with other design disciplines – IxD can take your customer’s everyday interactions from forgettable to fantastic.
Here at Smart Design, we’ve been taking a few notes over the years of designing our clients’ physical and digital products. And here’s what we’ve learned.