Interaction Design is a field and approach to designing interactive experiences. These could be in any medium, not only digital media. Interactive experiences, necessarily, require time as an organizing principle (though not exclusively) and Interactive Design is concerned with a user, customer, audience, or participant's experience flow through time. Interactivity should not be confused with animation in which objects may move on a screen; interactivity is concerned with being part of the action of a system or performance and not merely watching the action passively.
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Web Anatomy: Introducing Interaction Design Frameworks
If we simply look at what's already working well, and why, we can give ourselves two things we desperately need: a starting point for the design, and insight into to how to create better-stronger-faster interactions that are just as easy to use as the old classics.
Hoekman, Robert, Jr. User Interface Engineering (2009). Articles>User Experience>Interaction Design>Planning
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Opportunity India: Interaction Design Market Potential
The Indian community of Interaction Designers and Usability Professionals is growing by rate of 20% annually which is far too less. Around 6 to 8 new design institutes have suddenly opened up in past couple of years (to name a few- Symbiosis Institute of Design, MAEER MIT’s Institute of Design and Creative-I College, Pune, Raffles Design International, Mumbai, IILM School of Design, Gurgaon, Wigan & Leigh College, New Delhi) But all these are indirect contributors to interaction design, as they do not offer education in that area.
Katre, Dinesh S. Journal of HCI Vistas (2006). Articles>User Experience>Interaction Design
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Design for Effective Support of User Intentions in Information-Rich Interactions 
With the rise of Web pages providing interactive support for problem-solving or providing large amounts of information on which a person is expected to act, designers and writers need to consider how a person interacts with increasingly complex information-rich environments and how they intend to use the information. This article examines some of the theory underlying why people make errors early in the problem-solving process when they form an intention. Since these errors are cognitively-based and occur before any physical action, it is harder to analyze their cause or incorporate changes to reduce them in a design. It examines factors which contribute to user errors and which designers and writers must consider to produce documents which reduce user errors in forming intentions.
Albers, Michael J. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication (2009). Articles>User Centered Design>Interaction Design>Cognitive Psychology
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Using Wikis to Document UI Specifications
The role of the interaction designer is to specify the interface’s behaviors and elements, so that engineers know what to build and how the product should operate. This documentation is commonly known as a UI specification or UI spec. There are several applications for authoring a UI spec, with wikis being a relatively new tool. However, designers should be aware of a wiki’s benefits and drawbacks for documentation, since UI specs uniquely reflect a project and its context. The documentation needs are often based on the size of the project, launch date, team dynamics, audience, technology, and the product development process. The development process usually plays a major role in how teams interact and how work is completed or delivered, thus, there is a direct relationship between the UI spec and the process the team is using.
Gremett, Peter. Boxes and Arrows (2009). Articles>User Experience>Interaction Design>Functional Specifications
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Good Interaction Designers Borrow, Great Ones Steal...
When you’re knee-deep in wireframes or CSS it’s all too easy to end up in a bubble of IxD books and blogs. One option is to take inspiration from vintage art and nature, but what about what other smart people are doing in their respective disciplines? In other words, why not steal from them? Here are my picks of a few other fields with ideas worth appropriating, or at least glancing at.
Telnaki, Vicky. Johnny Holland (2009). Articles>Information Design>Interaction Design
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Applying Curiosity to Interaction Design: Tell Me Something I Don’t Know
Given just a bit of information, we naturally crave more. Given a puzzle, we have to solve it. So, as interaction designers, how are we using this bit of insight into human behavior?
Anderson, Stephen. Johnny Holland (2009). Articles>User Centered Design>Interaction Design>Cognitive Psychology
#35230
iPhone Is Not Easy to Use: A New Direction for UX Design
I live and breathe user experience design, and yet it took me two years to get myself the device referenced by almost every single presentation about user experience since 2007… Apple’s iPhone. My reasons were very specific and perhaps boring, but what is interesting is the perspective this wait has afforded me. Since it was released, the iPhone has grabbed an astonishing share of mobile Web traffic, been regarded as a “game-changer” in both the design and business worlds, and has even been referred to as the “Jesus Phone.” Now that I’ve owned one for two weeks I’ve developed a different perspective. The iPhone is surprisingly difficult to use, but it sure is fun! And that is why it’s a game-changer.
Beecher, Frederick. Johnny Holland (2009). Articles>Usability>Interaction Design>User Experience
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Organizational Culture 101: A Practical How-To For Interaction Designers
It’s happened to all of us. We walk into what we think is a Web redesign project, only to find we have unwittingly ignited the fires of WW III in our client’s organization. What begins as a simple design project descends – quickly – into an intra-organizational battle, with the unprepared interaction designer caught in the crossfire. What is it about design projects that seem to attract such power struggles? Contrary to what you might think, being stuck in the middle of an internecine battle is actually an opportunity to effect meaningful change on your client’s organization. But it requires a set of practical tools to negotiate these battles and a more sophisticated language and knowledge to exploit these events to create meaningful change.
Ladner, Sam. Johnny Holland (2009). Articles>Project Management>Interaction Design>Workplace
#35232
Through the designs we create, we have the ability to directly influence another person’s behavior. The ethical implications of this are important and not easily definable. I was interested in ethics before I ever considered becoming a designer, but the lessons I learned while studying philosophy impacts the way I view my designs. In nature, our goal is a good one. We strive to help others by improving the interactions that define their life. This drives us to create and innovate new ways of interacting with old concepts. The question remains, do we have the right to influence another person? Further, are there guiding principles we can follow that can keep us on the moral path? The answers to these questions rests on the shoulders of the whole community, not a single person or group.
Nunnally, Brad. Johnny Holland (2009). Articles>User Experience>Interaction Design>Rhetoric
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The watchclock is another kind of interaction design, one whose function corrals the user into a single, linear, constrained sort of behavior. The night watchman has a fundamental social constraint — the desire to not get fired from their job. This constraint allows the watchclock patrol system to work so effectively (some would say insidiously) as an interaction design instrument of control.
Fahey, Christopher. Graphpaper (2009). Articles>User Experience>Management>Interaction Design
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Design for Interaction: Ideation and Design Principles
Once you’ve come up with tons of ideas, how do you choose which ones are worth pursuing? You use a set of design principles that will not only help select the best ideas, but guide the design through refinement, prototyping, development, and beyond. But first, let’s diverge and come up with concepts.
Saffer, Dan. Johnny Holland (2009). Design>User Experience>Interaction Design
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Engaging the User: What We Can Learn from Games
As an Interaction Designer, I’m perpetually impressed with the continual design success inherent in most video games. We are taught to know our users by understanding their goals, leveraging mental models, and taking ourselves out of the equation in order to design useful and appropriate interfaces. And although a user-centered design approach is invaluable, I can’t help but wonder how game designers just seem to nail it time and again for what are large and diverse audiences.
Sasinski, Marc. Johnny Holland (2009). Articles>User Experience>Interaction Design>Games
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Australasian CRC for Interaction Design (ACID)
ACID is the Australasian Cooperative Research Centre for Interaction Design. We find better ways for people to interact with each other using communication technologies. Our expertise lies in helping people participate in the digital world.
ACID. Organizations>User Centered Design>Interaction Design>Australia
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Increase Conversions in Long Web Forms by Resolving the Accidental Back Button Activation Issue
The issue of accidentally activating the browser back button through the keyboard while interacting with a long web form is applicable to users across expertise levels. The time and effort wasted by the user can be said as proportional to the number of input fields filled by the user before accidentally exiting the page. Since no application feedback indicating cause of the error to the user is provided, depending upon user expertise, the user may or may not realize the cause of the error. Realizing what went wrong does not guarantee the possibility of reverting the error either. This leads to unnecessary loss in form conversions despite favorable user intent. A solution to resolve this issue (that the author hopes becomes standard practice) to plug the hole for lost conversion that translates to big numbers in absolute terms for high traffic websites is also provided.
Rautela, Abhay. evolt (2009). Design>Human Computer Interaction>Interaction Design>Forms
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Designing for B2B and Enterprise Applications
It's not uncommon to hear people complaining about the poor user experience of some B2B and enterprise applications. Read through these top tips to help you design enterprise applications that offer a better user experience and increase productivity.
Baxevanis, Alexander. Webcredible (2009). Articles>Human Computer Interaction>User Centered Design>User Experience
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When writing software, *please* don't give error messages that are only meaningful to developers of the software. Microsoft used to be awful for this: "System fault at DEAD:BEEF, please contact your system administrator". Which would've been cool, except that I *was* the system administrator.
Bailey, Jeff. LiveJournal (2009). Articles>Human Computer Interaction>User Centered Design>User Experience
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Design Essentials for Non-Designers
This tutorial is intended for practitioners who have come to interaction design from a research, psychology, information architecture, or other non-design background. It focuses on what happens after the requirements are done and before you build your first prototype. Design fields such as graphic arts, architecture, and industrial design have long-standing practices for innovative design, and these apply well to interaction design.
Schrag, John and Ian Hooper. Designing the User Experience at Autodesk (2009). Design>User Experience>Interaction Design
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An SME is someone who has been trained and has worked in the area that is being targeted for the new application. At Autodesk, we have found that pairing SMEs with Interaction Designers is the most efficient and successful way of meeting user centered design goals.
Hooper, Ian. Designing the User Experience at Autodesk (2009). Articles>Collaboration>Interaction Design>SMEs
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In my column, On Good Behavior, I’ll explore the essentials of good interaction design. This first column provides a brief introduction to interaction design—defining the scope this column will cover—then explores some key design principles. What is interaction design?
Gabriel-Petit, Pabini. UXmatters (2009). Articles>User Experience>Interaction Design>Workflow
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The Ever-Evolving Arrow: Universal Control Symbol 
The arrow and its brethren are everywhere on our computer screens. For example, a quick examination of the Firefox 3.0 browser, shown in Figure 1 in its standard configuration, yields eight examples of arrows—Forward, Back, and Reload buttons, scroll bar controls, and drop-down menus that reveal search engine, history, and bookmark choices.
Follett, Jonathan. UXmatters (2009). Articles>User Interface>Human Computer Interaction>Graphic Design
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The popular JavaScript library jQuery is an amazing way to extend the design possibilities of your site beyond what CSS can do. But luckily, if you are already comfortable with CSS, you have a huge head start in jQuery! This is a very basic introduction to including jQuery on your web page and getting started writing a few functions.
Coyier, Chris. CSS Tricks (2008). Articles>Web Design>Interaction Design>Screen Captures
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Starting off where we left off last time, we continue exploring the possibilities of jQuery. We revisit some of the old functions and make them do some smarter things. We explore a simple variable and an IF/ELSE statement. Then we look at the AJAX-y .load() function, the CSS function, and then finish off by writing out own custom function and going over how that layer of abstraction can help us keep our code clean. Semantics counts in JavaScript too!
Coyier, Chris. CSS Tricks (2008). Articles>Web Design>Interaction Design>Screencasts
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jQuery Part 3 – Image Title Plugin
This video focuses on taking an already existing idea and code and turning it into a jQuery plugin. In this case it helps keep our code as semantic as it can be, and with JavaScript off, degrades nicely. We cover the syntax of creating a plugin, show off the cool chain-ability of jQuery, and show how to make the plugin versatile and expandable.
Coyier, Chris. CSS Tricks (2009). Articles>Web Design>Interaction Design>Screencasts
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Adding Style To Your Microsoft Wpf And Silverlight Applications
Windows Presentation Foundation is a cross-browser cross-platform cross-device implementation of .NET for building and delivering the next generation of media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web.
Koenig, Chris. SlideShare (2007). Presentations>Multimedia>Interaction Design>Silverlight
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A group blog on social interaction design for social media by practitioners.
SxDSalon. Resources>Social Networking>Interaction Design>Blogs
