Designing for the "optimum flow" with interaction models
Why being invisible is the hallmark of a great interaction model
Yes, good design is invisible. It banks on your past experiences and expectations by modeling everything for your fulfillment. And those interactions are in perfect sync with your thought process working in tandem with the system. Then you are in the “flow” and not at all concerned about the working of the system. It just vanishes from your mind!
Why Interaction Model matter?
To survive in this experience economy, products have to be at par with the experiences and expectations of the users. Fortunately, businesses can now focus on users with user-centered design. They can deliver the best possible experiences based on users' context, channels, and landscapes And the starting point for laying foundations for a great user experience is through interaction models.
As a generic term, interaction-model has wide usage and in the context of interaction design, we can frame it as the underlying structure or framework that governs the behavior of a product or system with the users. It provides structure, consistency, direction, and feedback to interact with the system. To summarize, it’s the blueprint of actions between users and the system.
It provides structure, consistency, direction, and feedback to interact with the system.
Interaction models is a conceptual model that visualizes the interactions based on the mental model of the users. Governed by the principles of interaction design, a good model must display the following traits;
- Being invisible: An easy learning curve, familiarity with past experiences, prompt feedback, and anticipating user actions make a product invisible. Invisibility is achieved when users are in a state of flow using the product. It’s a hallmark of good interaction models!
- Consistency — Consistency creates trust. It gives a feeling of stability and honesty thereby increasing user satisfaction and ease of use. Surprises and shocks can ruin the trust.
- Familiarity principle — The model must have real-world metaphors, affordances, and past interactions for users to resonate quickly. The more familiar the users are with interaction, the quicker the adoption will be.
- User progression — A good model must adapt with user maturity. The progression from novice to mastery of users requires the system to provide adequate interactions. There must be provisions for basics and expert users.
- Unobtrusive- The model must display adequate maturity in giving alerts and feedbacks. Rather than intimidating users on everything, the system must be passive calling less attention.
- Minimalism — Focusing on what is important and setting aside all others to help users focus on the task. In a sense, design around what is critical and leave the rest. Too many features, ads, and attention cravings will backfire.
Defining Interaction Models
Building interaction models require comprehensive insights into users, their context, channels, and landscapes. It is a collaborative process starting from whiteboarding sessions, workshops and progressing towards more concrete models. By bringing stakeholders, SME’s, and users into the process, we can ensure diversity in viewpoints. These insights will serve as the guiding stars for defining an interaction model.
The interaction model draws insights from the initial research done on users, their context, and product landscapes. They can be used to generate ideas for the initial models. These activities are not all linear and call for maximum experimentations.
- Scenario Ideations — From personas, key scenarios and context can be captured and prioritized. They can be on usage ratio, by significance, or by context. These scenarios can be further visualized with rough sketches with users in their context.
- Conceptual Models — From scenarios, one can easily figure out the connections, hierarchies, interactions and can visualize a low fidelity model quickly. They are an abstract diagrammatic representation of entities, structures, and relationships enabling us to digest the big picture.
- Information Architecture — By giving structure to the elements in conceptual models, IA organizes, labels, and gives hierarchy to the data. The information is a bit more concrete and provides more details like site maps, hierarchies, categorizations, navigation, and metadata.
- Screen Layouts — From the IA, you get to know the key primary functions, verbs, and nouns. Based on this, the foundational structure can be visualized as a starting point. Form factors like mobile, tablet, and desktop must also be considered at this stage. Common layout patterns like full-width, 2-col, 3-col, etc
- Components — They provide hierarchy and structure to the layouts by organizing contents into meaningful blocks. Components are based on functionality and can have multiple patterns to represent them. For example, headers, footers, headings, content modules, Data tables, etc
- Patterns — They are the building blocks of the interface. They bring harmony and consistency to the UI. A typical pattern will be having multiple elements that display how data or information is organized. They can be reused across different components to achieve a function. Typical UI patterns like search, list, tables, Graphs, images list, etc
Conclusion
The most exciting part of any design is the implementation phase. For a practitioner, nothing excites more than the joy of seeing those insights transitioning into beautiful concepts. Interaction models serve as a foray into this process by giving us the foundational structure to start with. Through rapid ideations and validations, we can uncover users' mental and can align the interactions with that. And this what makes them invisible.
As they say “the most beautiful things are always hidden”
Further resources
Flow — The Psychology of Optimal Experience
