Invisible Details of Interaction Design

Summary

Design can feel like there's no science to it — only feel and intuition. Even researchers have trouble grounding interaction design practices in science, inherently treating them as a mysterious black box. 1 While from my own experience that's partly true, I have been trying to deconstruct and dig out the why behind great displays of interaction design.Searching the Internet for depth on interaction design yields a plethora of recycled content obsessing over user personas, storyboards, and Venn diagrams labeled with "UI" and "UX". Besides a few exceptional talks, actual substance and insight reveal themselves to those willing to fanatically dig for them. Either through studying obscure, long-winded research papers or by maniacally replaying hundreds of slow motion screen recordings.Sitting down and just thinking hard does not magically produce valuable discoveries either. The essence of the word "interaction" implies a relationship between a human and an environment. In my experience, great revelations surface from making something — filling your headspace with a problem — and then going for a synthesising daydreaming walk to stir the pot.This essay is not a tutorial nor a collection of guidelines. But rather an observation on the invisible details of a few interactions that I use often but rarely think about. Besides recreating interfaces, I found this exercise in reflection to be another great way to build a stronger design intuition and vocabulary.MetaphorsWhat even is interaction design? Here's how I think about it through the lens of technology. Interaction design is an artform to make experiences that fluidly respond to human intent. When does a swipe trigger an action? Do gestures retain momentum? What happens if a finger is covering content? How can we predict intent based on context? Executing well on details like these make products feel like a natural extension of ourselves. 2But it's not an artform in the same way as painting or composing music. There's ...