What makes up interaction design and what are some of the industry’s challenges?
Interaction design is made up of a series of steps and processes in the hopes of understanding the audience and how the eventual product you design will affect them. . One of the challenges the industry faces is the time it takes to commit to this whole process. Explaining to a boss why you need multiple weeks to write stories and scenarios might be a hard sell, especially to someone who isn’t well versed in the field. Another challenge is the difficulty of relating to your audience and understanding their experiences, situations, perceptions, cultural norms, etc.
What is interaction design, how its evolving. What fields does it draw knowledge from?
Interaction design consists of not only a process to design a product, but that process is interwoven into how the user of the product will use and interact with it on a daily basis. As interaction design absorbs techniques and ideas from other fields, it continues to evolve in its process of understanding the user and how they interact with life. As time progresses, certain types of products and design systems are becoming more refined thanks to interaction designers, allowing for more efficient systems and ways of interaction.
Due to the nature of interaction design and its need for knowledge of its user, interaction design can draw knowledge from marketing, graphic design, industrial design, even UI and UX designers. Interaction design takes the steps these fields use and upgrades them, taking them to the next level to be more intricate, detailed, and suited for conceptual ways of thinking. Often these fields focus too much on the visual aspect of design, whereas interaction design focuses strictly on the conceptual navigation of users.