Interaction design

What is actually the difference between interface and interaction design?

The term ‘interface design’ suggests that in web design the coding, users and how a message is relayed (interface) can be regarded separately. One major problem of isolating design at the interface level is that it allows programmers, or product designers to reason that an interface will be glued on it afterwards. It postpones design after programming or sketching. If you want to offer a carefully designed user experience all three components support the user experience.

‘Behavioural design’ tells how the product (website or consumer product) should respond and communicate to users. Like behavioural designers interaction designers also work from the inside out. Interaction designers start with the goals user want to achieve and distillate that into broader goals.

‘Conceptual design’ takes it even one level deeper; instead of looking at the goals it looks at the what is valuable for the users. The way to fulfil this is still open, it could be a new product, but suits better to the needs of users.

Where does the interaction designer belong? In all of them! The interaction designer first investigates what is most valuable for users by thinking conceptually, after that the behaviour gets detailed; how should the user fulfil his goals and finally at an interface level. How should the interface look like to get this particular user experience?

A practical example. One of the managers wants a reporting tool that counts the shipped units for the several divisions in the company.

• The interface designer would determine how the tool should look like.
• The behavioural designer would decide how the tool should interact with the managers, for instance how the manager can get his reports in such a way that he can directly uses them.
• The conceptual designer would determine what the manager wants to achieve with the tool. Is it for accounting purposes or is it going to be a performance indicator for all the different divisions? He could conclude the manager actually needs a different tool, for instance a tool that measures the turnover since he wanted to compare their performance.

The differences look subtle but the impact can be substantial. Although I don’t have any evidence I strongly believe successful companies outperform in the conceptual design level.