Cao Jerry, Zieba Kamil, Ellis Matt. Interaction Design Best Practices: Mastering Time, Responsiveness, and Behavior

UXPin (PL), 2015. — 108 p.Interaction design can be broken down into 5 dimensions: words, visuals, objects/space, time, and behavior. Words are interactions. Visuals and objects/space are what users interact with. Time is what users interact within. And finally, behavior is how users and the interface act and react.
The first three dimensions allow for interaction, while the last two dimensions define interaction. In this volume, we’ll dissect the last two intangible dimensions: time and behavior.
Interactions occur over time, while behavior triggers interactions.
The user’s first action can trigger many reactions that occur over time. There may be a lull in the user behavior as they await feedback from the interface, or they may engage in a series of rapid-fire actions in hopes of speeding things up. It all depends upon the task, the context, and of course, the user.Behavior works both ways. Just like a conversation, your interface needs to react in a way that feels logical, natural, helpful, and most importantly, personable. Interaction design is much like poetry because your goal is creating conversations that live beyond the medium through which they occur.
In this e-book, we cover topics spanning UX design, UI design, psychology, and human-computer interaction. While these topics can get quite theoretical at times, we want to explain them as practically as possible. In our experience, we’ve always found it helpful to analyze visual examples, so you’ll find plenty of explanations in plain English.
We wrote this book to be as practical as possible. Interaction design, especially when it comes to the intangibles, can become extremely theoretical as we dive into human-computer-interaction, psychology, UX design, and interface design. But this is a book of action, not of big words and lofty ideals.
We will explain the theories, but teach by example.
Beginners can learn about the fundamentals of behavioral design such as Hick’s Law, the three categories of animations, and friction vs. motivation. More advanced readers will learn how to create user habits, how to apply the art of persuasion towards interface design, and other tactics that combine practical design with human psychology. To make this book as actionable as possible, we’ve also analyzed visual case studies from 30+ companies including Apple, AirBnB, Google, Twitter, Mint, MailChimp, Kickstarter, Wufoo, and Netflix.