Human Communication Necessitates Interactive Design

Interactive design is a design process that applies knowledge of how users interact with a webpage, application, or product with a focus on “anticipating what users might need to do and ensuring that the interface has elements that are easy to access, understand, and use to facilitate those actions.” As in any business, there are costs associated with content creation, such as time and money spent developing a product. However, there is also an interaction cost to the user of that product, where the interaction cost is the combined cognitive and physical effort that a user must employ to interact with a product to achieve their end goal.

The cognitive effort includes reading, scrolling, looking for something relevant, and typing, which impacts the psychology of the human mind and how one learns, retains, and engages with content (per cognitive and human-computer interaction theories). Ways to reduce these cognitive efforts include limiting page load wait times and the memory load a user must maintain to complete a desired task. Though this may depend on the user and device used, general practices that help reduce cognitive effort include writing for the web or readability by using plain language, bullet points, streamlining navigation, effective color contrasts, and using the space around text effectively (For more advice on how to improve content communication on websites see a case study on disability and user experience which looks at website and online survey accessibility). However, before one can apply interaction cost techniques, it is important to understand the larger issue of user experience.

UX and Interactive Design Background

User experience (UX) is an iterative process that collects information about users’ behaviors, needs, and motivations for a product, service, or space. This process is typically done in the UX research phase, which informs the UX design phase, synthesizes the research, and applies it to a design form. Both phases rely on iterative processes and UX principles that strive to support user behavior, usability, and usefulness.

As discussed in my book chapter on inclusive design, popular UX research methods and tools include:

• Focus groups: a moderated discussion with a few participants
• Individual interviews
• Personas: researched, reliable, and realistic representations of the user audience
• Surveys: structured questionnaires
• Task/scenario analysis: observation of users performing tasks related to the project
• Content inventory: list of all the content on the site to gain insight into its text, images, and documents
• Organization schemes/structures: how the site categorizes content and relationships within the site
• Market analysis: compare competitive or related projects

These methods and tools help inform the design phase, including the information architecture (content, layout, navigation), interaction design (prompts, calls to action, user flow), user interface design, and usability. UX design is also an element of the customer experience of a product that involves cognitive, sensory, and behavioral responses of a customer or user transaction of an experience. In both cases, example methods and tools used in UX design include:

• Wireframes: illustrations of the UI
• UI elements: buttons, dropdowns, breadcrumbs, search fields, icons, progress bars, etc.
• Card sorting: evaluates the information architecture of the site
• Prototypes: draft version of product
• Color wheel/contrasts illustrate relationships between color levels
• Usability testing: evaluates a product or service by testing with representative users
• Accessibility evaluation
• Scenarios: user stories, context, and user flow
• User documentation: instructions, FAQs, etc.

UX Principles

UX researchers and designers don’t just jump into and run with a project. These professionals are guided by values or principles that frame research and design decisions in a product or service. Depending on the organization and goals of the product, these UX principles may vary. Such principles should be clear, inspire empathy for users, and avoid designing based on personal preference—helping to remind designers they are not the user.

There are broad principles for user experience (e.g., people-centered, less is more, etc.), as well as sub-categories such as visual design and usability or interaction design. For example, in visual communication design, principles include scale, hierarchy, balance, contrast, and Gestalt. Together, these visual design principles inform how design elements complement each other and make useful and thoughtful visual designs that help to communicate a message. In interaction design, principles may include aesthetics, anticipation, consistency, and discoverability. In inclusive design, principles include user empathy (you are not the user), avoiding bias, mindfulness, content prioritization, consistency, offering choice, and documentation. These interaction and inclusive design principles inform how users access, navigate, and discover the platform communicating a message or delivering a product.

Digital Media and Interactive Design

Since interactive design looks at how the user or customer experiences a product, we can extrapolate those UX and visual communication design principles to digital media. For example, aesthetics in the visual design, using contrast, balance, scale, and Gestalt principles, can potentially impact a user’s cognitive, sensory, and behavioral response to a product (or even whether to initiate an interaction with a product). After considering communication design principles, the next approach would be to consider interaction design and inclusive design principles to help retain and sustain user engagement with the product. This can be done by applying user empathy, consistency, discoverability, and offering choice. All of this can impact the interaction cost of a product and the user’s effort to use or continue use.

Some examples of these various UX principles in practice include the following:

Interactive Features and Costs Defined by UX Principles

Regardless of the digital media or platform used, a product’s user experience can meet product use goals when UX principles are applied. These UX principles are applicable at the big picture and narrower levels. For example, interactive features of a product are important. Consider hotspot media, a type of feature that enables users to make specific images clickable within a design (such as those used in Thinglink or TimelineJS) or AI-design tools that turn text prompts into images or magically edit or erase image content (such as those in Canva). These interactive features make designing easier and product use more engaging for end-user goals who use these tools to communicate a message.

Whether you are a digital media and interactive design tool user, researcher, instructor, or business, learning to communicate using new or digital media and UX principles can help strengthen your end goals. Understanding user behavior through communication technologies, UX research methods, and applying UX principles in the design of a product can increase usability and user satisfaction. Without UX principles, communication and media designs and the organizations that use them risk alienating the customer or user experience, impacting the interaction cost. Thus, it is critical for any design to first start by defining communication and design values and making design decisions based on those principles. From there, you can minimize the efforts a user must employ to interact with digital media and products, which creates meaningful user experiences that impact long-term use and other costs.