Interaction Design Articles & Videos

  • Flat-Design Best Practices

    Avoid the negative side effects of flat design by clearly differentiating between clickable and unclickable elements.

  • Using Swipe to Trigger Contextual Actions

    Implementations of swipe-to-delete or swipe to reveal contextual actions often suffer from usability problems.

  • How Channels, Devices, and Touchpoints Impact the Customer Journey

    A touchpoint is defined by a combination of channel, device, and user task.

  • Wireflows: A UX Deliverable for Workflows and Apps

    Wireflows are a combination of wireframes and flowcharts. They can document workflow and screen designs when there are few pages that change dynamically.

  • Consistency in the Omnichannel Experience

    Consistency of interaction across channels builds customer trust and leads to a successful omnichannel user experience.

  • 6 Tips for Successful Personalization

    Well-designed personalization carefully considers the creation of roles or types, ensures content is available for roles, and retains user control over the experience.

  • Augmented Reality: What Does It Mean for UX?

    AR technologies can impact the user experience by decreasing interaction cost, cognitive load, and attention switching.

  • 7 Tips for Successful Customization

    Customization tools must be simple-to-use, easy-to-find, and easily edited, with both a clear intent and a clear benefit to users.

  • Customer Journeys and Omnichannel User Experience

    Organizations must create omnichannel UX strategies that optimize the end-to-end user experience of completing a task across devices and interaction channels.

  • The Impact of Interaction Design on Brand Perception

    Your interaction-design decisions have measurable effects on your users’ emotions and how they perceive your brand.

  • Customization vs. Personalization in the User Experience

    Customization gives control to the user and personalization gives control to the site. Both can enhance experiences, but only when carefully implemented.

  • Brand Is Experience in the Digital Age

    Brand is a perception of value resulting from the sum of a customer’s experiences, made up of visual, tonal, and behavioral brand components, often shaped by UX.

  • Expandable Menus: Pull-Down, Square, or Pie?

    Selecting an option inside a menu depends on how far away that option is from the menu icon. Drop-down menus, megamenus, pie or radial menus, and marking menus arrange items in different patterns to optimize the reach time.

  • The Role of Enhancement in Web Design

    An enhancement is a user-interface feature that speeds up or enriches the interaction on some platforms for some users. Enhancements take advantage of special user or device capabilities and need to be backed up by more traditional ways of implementing the same interaction.

  • User Intent Affects Filter Design

    Results pages that refresh too soon or shift the page position disrupt the filtering process. Design filters and facets to offer a smooth user experience.

  • Everything I Needed to Know About Good User Experience I Learned While Working in Restaurants

    Satisfying user experiences are built on good customer-service principles. Restaurant UX provides many lessons for interaction design.

  • Long-Term Exposure to Flat Design: How the Trend Slowly Decreases User Efficiency

    Clickable UI elements with absent or weak visual signifiers condition users over time to click and hover uncertainly across pages — reducing efficiency and increasing reliance on contextual cues and immediate click feedback. Young adult users may be better at perceiving subtle clickability clues, but they don’t enjoy click uncertainty any more than other age groups.

  • Smart-TV Usability: Accessing Content is Key

    UX design for television UIs should focus on minimizing user effort and providing quick and smooth access to content.

  • Preventing User Errors: Avoiding Conscious Mistakes

    Thoughtful design is transparent and easy to understand, provides a preview, and helps users to easily correct their errors.

  • Preventing User Errors: Avoiding Unconscious Slips

    Users are often distracted from the task at hand, so prevent unconscious errors by offering suggestions, utilizing constraints, and being flexible.