The Journey of User Experience (UX) Design (3/3)

This is third and last article of the series where we are going to talk about Interaction Design and Information Visualization.

In the first article of the series we discussed about basics of UX design and Design thinking. The second article was focused on Usability and User Research.

What is Interaction Design?

Interaction design is an important component under the umbrella of UX design. It is the design of the interaction between users and products. The goal of interaction design is to create products that enable users to achieve their objective(s) in the best way possible.

There is huge overlap between interaction design and UX design. However UX design is more than interaction design: it also involve user research, creating user personas, performing user testing and usability testing, etc.

Dimensions of Interaction Design

There are five dimensions of interaction design, useful for understanding what interaction design involves.

• 1D: Words - Words used in interactions, such as button labels should be meaningful and simple to understand. They should communicate information to users, but not so much information that they end up overwhelming users or slowing them down.
• 2D: Visual Representations - This concerns graphical elements such as images, typography and icons that user interacts with. These usually supplement the words we use to communicate information to users. Human value images immensely as it carries many words - a story, in fact.
• 3D: Physical Objects or Space - This concerns about the physical objects through which user interacts with product. It can be a laptop, with mouse or touch-pad or a smartphone, with user fingers. Also the kind of physical space within which user use these objects. For instance standing in a crowded train or sitting at a desk in the office.
• 4D: Time - It mostly refers to media that changes with time(animation, videos, sounds). Motion and sounds play a crucial role in giving visual and audio feedback to user's interactions.
• 5D: Behavior - This dimension is all about how the previous dimensions define the interactions a user should be having with a product. It also includes the reactions - for instance, emotional responses or feedback of users and the product.

Information Visualization

There is huge amount of data flows past each of us in an ordinary day, from newspaper we read, to the emails we receive throughout the day, to the bank statements generated whenever we withdraw money or spend it, to the conversation we have and so on. This created an explosion in the volumes of data to which we are exposed which leads to large amount of possible confusion and decision paralysis. There is more data available than we can comfortably process.

Information Visualization is the art of representing data in a way that makes it easy to understand and to manipulate, help us make sense of information and thus make it useful in our lives.

Common Uses for Information Visualization

Some of very common uses for information visualization includes:

• Presentation - Some ideas are simply too awkward to communicate in words and that a visual representation can help someone understand concepts that might otherwise be impossible to explain. "A picture is worth a thousand words".
• Confirmation Analysis - We can use Information Visualization to help confirm our understanding and analysis of data. For example, if we perceive a relationship between tow stock prices, we can plot the data and see fit he two are related. In confirmation analysis, we use information visualization by tracking a couple of items behaviors and comparing them so as to establish a link.

Information Visualization is designed to help us make sense out of data and swiftly so. We can use it to explore relationships between data, to confirm ideas we hold about data, or to explain data in a easy-to-digest manner.

That's all for our journey to UX design. I hope you got fair understanding of UX design processes and enjoyed this journey.