Interaction Design Articles & Videos

  • 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.

  • Timing Guidelines for Exposing Hidden Content

    Events triggered via hover or click require distinct timing to avoid accidental activations and ensure that the user feels in control of the interface.

  • Beware Horizontal Scrolling and Mimicking Swipe on Desktop

    Even as more sites mimic swiping gestures and incorporate horizontal scrolling in desktop designs, users remain reluctant to move sideways through content.

  • First Principles of Interaction Design (Revised & Expanded)

    Basic principles are fundamental to the design and implementation of effective interfaces, whether for traditional GUI environments, the web, mobile devices, wearables, or Internet-connected smart devices.

  • Interaction Cost

    Interaction cost is the effort users spend to achieve their goals on a site or app.

  • Suggested Readings From Design of Everyday Things, Revised edition (at jnd.org)

    Don Norman's list of general books for interaction design from the 2013 revision and expansion of the book "Design of Everyday Things."

  • Providing Predictable Targets (at asktog.com)

    Predictable Target should appear high on your list of mandatory rules, only to be violated when it can be proven that another consideration, in a particular circumstance, will result in even greater productivity.

  • Browse vs. Search: Which Deserves to Go? (at asktog.com)

    A reader asks for advice: "Why on earth we seem to want to browse or scroll long lists to find something when typing into a search box is so much more efficient?"

  • Parallel & Iterative Design + Competitive Testing = High Usability

    3 methods for increasing UX quality by exploring and testing diverse design ideas work even better when you use them together.

  • How to Achieve Painless Registration (at asktog.com)

    I'm about to give you a number of ways to increase sales on ecommerce sites and increase sign-ups on service sites, but first, raise your hand if you personally, when surfing the web, enjoy registering to use a site.