The A to Z of UX - I is for Interaction Design: A Guide for Product Owners & Stakeholders, 'Interaction Design 101'
- UXcentric
- May 3
- 12 min read
Updated: May 6
DARREN WILSON
Back in 2004, I began my career as an Interaction Designer at Jaguar Land Rover, working on cutting-edge in-vehicle infotainment systems operated by touch, physical controls and voice recognition.
Things weren’t so technological back then, and we even designed some of the Head Unit screens in MS Excel!
Ever since, Interaction Design (IxD) has been at the heart of my work, whether on cars or motorbikes, in train stations, on a website or a mobile app.
Interaction Design is often misunderstood as simply 'designing buttons' or 'making things look good.' My wife sarcastically says I draw lines and boxes for a living!
Actually, it's the engine behind how users experience and engage with a digital product.
For product owners, founders, and stakeholders, understanding the basics of Interaction Design is critical as it enables you to make smarter product decisions, give clearer feedback to UX teams, and shape experiences your users will love.
In this guide, you’ll learn:
What Interaction Design is (and what it isn’t)
How to spot good vs. bad interactions in your product
How to give better feedback to your UX teams
How to support better decision-making during development
Why Interaction Design Matters
When interaction design is successful, your product feels intuitive, efficient, and even delightful. Users can complete tasks smoothly, understand what's happening, and trust the system. When done poorly, even the best features can feel confusing or frustrating.
Good interaction design reduces friction, improves user satisfaction, and drives conversions. It can turn a decent app into a loved one and reduce the need for customer support at the same time. Investing pays dividends across usability, engagement, and brand perception.
“The central focus of interaction design is to make products usable — easy to learn, effective to use, and providing an enjoyable user experience.”
Yvonne Rogers, Helen Sharp & Jennifer Preece
Why you need an Interaction Designer
Interaction Designers play a crucial role in shaping how users engage with technology. While the broader field of User Experience (UX) focuses on the overall journey a person has with a product, Interaction Design focuses on the moments within that journey, the way users move, click, tap, and navigate.
An Interaction Designer is responsible for creating intuitive, seamless interactions that make using a product feel natural and satisfying. They focus on how elements behave (buttons, menus, gestures, animations) and ensuring every action has a clear and meaningful response. It's about making sure the user knows what will happen when they take an action and feels confident and in control while doing so.
Effective Interaction Design is often invisible, when done well, and users don’t notice the design, they just experience it. Whether designing a mobile app, a website, or even physical interfaces like kiosks and wearable devices, Interaction Designers collaborate closely with UX researchers, visual designers, and developers to bring a product’s functionality to life in a way that's both beautiful and usable.
Having an interaction designer in your team embeds design thinking into your product development process, leading to faster validation, fewer costly mistakes, and better cross-functional collaboration.
In short, Interaction Designers are the architects of how users do things within an experience, turning complex functionality into simple human-centred interactions that support both user needs and business goals.
“The main thing you need to know about users is that they don’t think the way you do.”
Steve Krug
What an Interaction Designer does
Defining User Flows
Interaction Designers map out the paths users take to complete tasks within a product. They ensure these flows are logical, efficient, and aligned with both user needs and business objectives.
Creating Wireframes and Prototypes
To visualise ideas, Interaction Designers build wireframes, which are basic layouts showing how a screen or system is structured. They often take it further by developing interactive prototypes that simulate how users will move through an experience.
Designing Interaction Patterns
They define how elements like buttons, menus, forms, and gestures behave. This includes detailing how the system responds to user actions, providing clear feedback that helps users feel confident and in control.
Collaborating Across Teams
Interaction Designers work closely with UX researchers, visual designers, product managers, and developers. They translate research insights into actionable design solutions and ensure that technical realities are factored into the design.
Testing and Iterating
User testing is vital. Interaction Designers observe how real users interact with prototypes, gather feedback, and refine the design to improve usability, accessibility, and delight.
By focusing on these areas, interaction designers ensure that the products they create are not only functional but also provide a satisfying user experience.
The Five Dimensions of Interaction Design
A useful way to understand what Interaction Design involves is through the Five Dimensions of Interaction Design. It is a concept originally introduced by academic Gillian Crampton Smith as four dimensions and later extended by the senior Interaction Designer Kevin Silver.
The model breaks down the elements that shape a user’s experience into five key components:
1D: Words
This includes the language used in interactions, such as labels on buttons, error messages, instructions, and microcopy. Words should be clear, concise, and purposeful. They guide users, set expectations, and help prevent confusion.
2D: Visuals
These are the graphical elements users interact with, including icons, images, colours, typography, and layout. Visuals work alongside words to communicate status, functionality, and intent.
3D: Physical Objects or Space
This dimension considers the device and environment: Are users interacting on a phone or a desktop? Are they on the move or at a desk? The context and physical hardware directly influence how users experience and interact with the product.
4D: Time
Time refers to elements that change over time, for example, animations, transitions, audio cues, and how the system responds dynamically. It also considers how long users spend on tasks and whether progress is saved or resumable later.
5D: Behaviour
Behaviour captures how all the other dimensions come together to enable interaction: How does the system respond to inputs? How do users feel during and after an interaction? This includes feedback, emotional response, and the overall logic of interaction flows.
12 Practical Interaction Design Building Blocks for Product Owners
1. What is Interaction Design?
Interaction Design is a subset of the overall User Experience (UX), and is impacted by lots of other disciplines too.
Specifically, Interaction Design is about designing the interaction between users and the products and experiences that they use. Often, but not exclusively, these are digital, such as apps, websites and in-car entertainment.
The goal of interaction design is to create experiences that help users achieve their goals as effectively and efficiently as possible.
Successful interaction design crafts the flow of actions, decisions, and feedback that guide users through your product.
Unlike visual design, which deals with aesthetics, interaction design is about usability, logic, and behaviour. It encompasses everything from tapping a button to navigating through a multi-step form or receiving confirmation after submitting information.
At its core, it ensures that user actions feel natural and lead to expected outcomes.
Applied well, interaction design removes friction and helps users achieve their goals. It’s what makes a digital experience feel seamless rather than clunky.
“The practice of designing interactive digital products, environments, systems and services. Like most design disciplines, interaction design is concerned with form. However, first and foremost, interaction design focuses on something that traditional disciplines do not often explore: behavior.”
Alan Cooper et al.
2. Affordance & Signifiers
Affordances are the potential actions an interface offers. For example, a toggle affords switching between two states. Signifiers are the cues that indicate how to perform a given action.
These can be visual (a shadowed button suggests it can be clicked), textual (labels), or interactive (a cursor change on hover). Users shouldn’t have to guess what something does. Strong affordance paired with clear signifiers helps users move confidently through an interface.
Poor signifiers result in hesitation and errors. As a stakeholder, understanding this helps you assess whether the interface is intuitive and reduces user uncertainty.
“Affordances define what actions are possible. Signifiers specify how people discover those possibilities: signifiers are signs, perceptible signals of what can be done. Signifiers are of far more importance to designers than are affordances.”
Donald Norman
3. Feedback Loops
Feedback is essential in interaction design. It tells users that their actions have had an effect, keeping them informed and in control. They can then easily correct errors or refine their behaviour, if required.
Feedback can be visual (button changes colour), auditory (a ping), or haptic (a vibration). It reassures users, guides workflows, and corrects errors. For example, after submitting a form, users expect a message confirming success or highlighting what went wrong.
Without feedback, users feel lost or assume the system is broken. Effective feedback is immediate, clear, and proportional, helping users build trust with your product.
4. Navigation & Structure
Navigation is how users find their way through your product, and it needs to feel logical, consistent, and predictable. Whether it’s a top-level menu, a tab bar, or breadcrumb trails, a well-structured navigation system reduces cognitive load.
The structure of your content (how it’s grouped, labelled, and accessed) matters just as much. It should match how users think, not how your org chart is structured.
Good navigation and structure support discoverability, task flow, and user confidence. Poor navigation leads to frustration and drop-off. When evaluating a product, always ask whether users can easily find what they need.
The BBC website supports users with clear menus, an indication of what the current location is and a search facility should they need it.
5. Accessibility Basics
Accessible design ensures your product works for everyone, including users with disabilities. This includes people who use screen readers, navigate via keyboard, or require high-contrast visuals.
Accessibility is not just a compliance issue. It’s about inclusive, ethical design that considers a wide range of needs and contexts. Key practices include semantic HTML, ARIA labels, keyboard navigability, sufficient colour contrast, and meaningful alt text for images.
Accessible interaction design improves usability for all users, especially in low-light, noisy, or rushed environments. It also expands your potential audience and demonstrates a commitment to quality.
“Designing for accessibility doesn’t mean designing for disability; it means designing for everyone.”
Alan Cooper et al.
6. Common Interaction Patterns
Patterns are familiar interaction models users have encountered across many products: accordions, modals, dropdowns, sliders, and carousels. These shared conventions help users predict how something will work, which lowers the learning curve.
Patterns work best when used consistently and appropriately. Misusing them (like adding a carousel to display critical content) can hurt usability. Recognising and leveraging standard patterns is a shortcut to user trust and understanding. It also streamlines design and development.
Use patterns that people are familiar with, such as those in Material Design or iOS where they will have experienced those patterns daily with their CE devices.
As a stakeholder, look for consistency and familiarity in your product’s interaction patterns and question novelty that may confuse users.
7. Micro-Interactions
Micro-interactions are the small, often delightful moments that occur during a single task. Think of a button ripple effect when tapped, a pull-to-refresh animation, or a password strength indicator.
They help communicate state, guide behaviour, and create a sense of responsiveness. While subtle, these details contribute significantly to the feel of a product. They show craft and spark emotional engagement.
Thoughtful micro-interactions reassure users that the system is responsive and functioning. But they must serve a purpose. When overdone or purely decorative, they can distract from the task.
8. Responsive Behaviour
Today’s users switch between phones, tablets, and laptops within the same journey. Responsive interaction design ensures your product adapts smoothly to these contexts. It goes beyond screen size, considering touch vs. mouse input, loading speeds, and environmental conditions.
Layouts should flow gracefully, controls should fit the device, and interactions should feel natural. A responsive product reduces friction and improves accessibility.
It also signals professionalism and user-centric thinking. If a form is unusable on mobile, you risk losing business. Responsive design is no longer optional, it’s expected.
9. Onboarding
Onboarding helps new users understand your product, set it up correctly, and reach their first moment of value. Done right, it reduces drop-off and accelerates engagement. Onboarding might include guided tours, tooltips, checklists, or subtle progress indicators.
It should be contextual, non-intrusive, and skippable—not a lecture. Onboarding is an interaction design challenge: how do you inform without overwhelming? How do you nudge users to the right behaviours? Stakeholders should evaluate onboarding not just by how much it teaches, but by how quickly it gets users to success.
10. Error Prevention & Handling
Errors happen, but good interaction design reduces their frequency and helps users recover gracefully. This includes preventing issues (e.g. disabling a submit button until a form is complete), offering clear messages when something goes wrong, and suggesting a next step.
Error messages should be human, not robotic or accusatory. Avoid codes like “404” unless your users are developers. Instead, tell them what happened and what to do.
Error design also includes softening the emotional impact of failure, such as animations, humour, or reassurance. When users feel supported, they’re more likely to continue.
“When people make errors, it is usually not their fault. It is a design problem.”
Donald Norman,
11. Design for Flow
Flow is the state where users are fully engaged in a task, progressing smoothly without interruption. Interaction design can either support this state or break it.
Design for flow means reducing distractions, sequencing actions logically, and keeping users in the moment. It might involve saving progress automatically, reducing decision points, or guiding users with inline feedback.
Think of booking a flight. When the design is executed well, the experience feels seamless. When poorly designed, it’s stressful. Supporting user flow increases satisfaction and conversion rates.
12. Iteration & Testing
No design is perfect on the first try. Iteration involves refining a product based on user feedback and observed behaviours. Testing (whether through usability studies, A/B testing, or prototypes) reveals friction points and unmet needs.
Interaction design is an ongoing process of learning and improving.
Stakeholders who support a culture of iteration allow teams to build better products over time. It's more cost-effective to refine early than to fix after launch.
Testing doesn’t slow you down. It saves time, reduces risk, and ensures your product truly works for its users.
The Future of Interaction Design and the Role of Artificial Intelligence
As AI continues to evolve, its impact on Interaction Design will be profound, changing not just how we design, but what we design and the expectations users bring to digital experiences. While the tools are getting smarter, the designer’s role is becoming more strategic, ethical, and human-focused.
Here are some themes to keep an eye on:
Personalised Experiences
AI enables systems to adapt to individual users in real time, responding to behaviour, preferences, and context. This opens the door to more tailored, intuitive experiences that evolve with the user.
Predictive Interactions
AI can anticipate needs before a user acts, helping to streamline complex workflows and reduce friction. Designers will increasingly move from reactive interface creation to crafting proactive, assistive systems.
Voice and Conversational Design
As voice and chat interfaces become more prevalent, designers must learn to design for natural language, tone, and flow, prioritising accessibility and crafting interactions that feel more human than mechanical.
Automation of Design Tasks
AI is beginning to automate some aspects of the design process itself, from generating layouts to analysing usability data. If done effectively, this can free up designers to focus more on strategy, creativity, and ethical oversight.
Ethical Design Considerations
With great power comes great responsibility. Designers must now consider how AI decisions are made, whether they are fair, transparent, and respectful of user autonomy. Inclusive, human-centred design is more critical than ever.
In short, AI won’t replace interaction designers, but it will reshape their role. The most successful designers will be those who can harness AI’s capabilities while keeping the human experience front and centre. But, very importantly, the human designer will still very much be part of the process.
“AI doesn’t eliminate the need for designers—it increases it. Now more than ever, we need people who can make intelligent systems understandable, humane, and accountable.”
Donald Norman
Final Thoughts
Understanding these concepts can help you better evaluate your product's UX, support your team more effectively, and make design decisions that serve both users and business goals. Great interaction design is invisible when it works, but the impact is tangible.
As someone who’s spent two decades immersed in Interaction Design, I’ve seen firsthand how a well-crafted user experience can transform a product. Whether it was on my first in-vehicle infotainment system or more recent mobile app designs, the core principle always remains the same: people should feel in control, have clarity, and understand what they need to do.
“People react positively when things are clear and understandable”
Dieter Rams
Looking ahead, AI will play a pivotal role in shaping how we approach Interaction Design. From creating personalised experiences to anticipating user needs, AI will make products smarter and more intuitive. However, the goal remains unchanged: designing seamless, engaging, and meaningful experiences that build a lasting relationship between users and products.
As you dive deeper into interaction design, remember: the goal is not just to create an interface, but to build a relationship between your users and your product that feels effortless and rewarding.
If you’re planning a digital product or want to level up your current experience, let's explore how thoughtful interaction design can reduce friction, delight users, and drive business results. Contact me to discuss how we can make your product’s interaction design world-class.
Further Reading
For those interested in delving deeper into Interaction Design, several authoritative resources offer comprehensive insights:
About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design
Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann, David Cronin, and Christopher Noessel
A comprehensive guide that equips designers and developers with user-centred principles and practical techniques to create intuitive, goal-directed digital products across modern platforms.
Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction
Helen Sharp, Jennifer Preece, and Yvonne Rogers:
An extensive overview of the interaction design field, blending theoretical foundations with practical applications for students and professionals alike.
Thoughts on Interaction Design
Jon Kolko
An insightful exploration of the complexities involved in designing interactive systems, offering reflective perspectives and thought-provoking commentary for experienced practitioners.
Don't Make Me Think
Steve Krug
A seminal and accessible guide to web usability that champions simplicity and intuitive design, widely regarded as essential reading for anyone involved in digital product design.
The Design of Everyday Things
Donald Norman
A foundational book on Human-Centred design that explains how good design makes everyday objects usable and intuitive—and how poor design leads to frustration and errors.
By studying these resources, designers and product owners alike can gain a deeper understanding of Interaction Design principles and apply them to create user-centred products that resonate with their audience.
Get in touch with the author
Darren Wilson, Co-Founder and Director of Design at UXcentric
07854 781 908
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