Interaction design is more than designing user interactions
Something I think we forget is that interaction design is much more than the design of individual user interactions within a product or service.
Designers need to think about what happens as a result of each user interaction that they design. They need to understand what comes before each interaction, and what happens afterwards.
I like this blog post by Laura Klein who explains:
“[You] have to design more than what happens during the interaction. You have to design what happens after the initial user interaction. And then you have to keep going.”
This is important. It’s why we don’t call designers in my team User Interface (UI) designers. That would suggest they’re only interested in user interactions.
Each user interaction is part of a series of things that happens as part of a service and these interactions all need to work together.
In order to work well the order they happen is important, as is how people understand the context of groups of questions or individual tasks.
Getting this right means the full integration of a feature into the business, administration, or process that delivers a successful outcome for users. It requires a level of design detail applied to each individual interaction that an interaction designer will focus on delivering but not without forgetting the relationships between every other interaction.
This is my blog where I’ve been writing for 18 years. You can follow all of my posts by subscribing to this RSS feed. You can also find me on Bluesky, less frequently now on X (formally Twitter), and on LinkedIn.