Interaction Design is:

• “The practice of designing interactive digital products, environments, systems, and services”
• “How specifically to design the behavior of complex interactive systems”
• Concerned with form, but first and foremost with the design of behavior

“We’ve found that when a designer focuses on people’s goals—the reasons why they use a product in the first place—as well as their expectations, attitudes, and aptitudes, they can devise solutions that people find powerful and pleasureable.”

A microinteraction is:

• “A contained product moment that revolves around a single use case—a tiny piece of functionality that only does one thing.”
• “The functional, interactive details of a product”

Four parts of a microinteraction

• Trigger: initiates the microinteraction
• Rules: define how the microinteraction works
• Feedback: helps you understand the rules of the system
• Loops and modes: meta rules of the microinteraction

Trigger

Initiates the microinteraction

Rules

Define how the microinteraction works

Ideation

• Research
• Brainstorming: ideas, questions, constraints
• Sketching: small, as many as possible

More detail

• More sketching: larger, with greater detail
• Modeling: wireframes or interactive prototypes

Evaluation

• Testing
• Presentation
• Critique

Why prototype?

• Shared communication
• Working through a design
• Selling your idea internally
• Usability testing
• Gauging technical feasability and value

Guiding principles for prototyping

• Understand your audience and intent
• Plan a little—prototype the rest
• Set expectations
• You can sketch
• It’s a prototype—not the Mona Lisa
• If you can’t make it, fake it
• Prototype only what you need
• Reduce risk—prototype early and often

Sketching inspiration

• Analyze others’ work
• “Sketchnotes”