Is interaction design the same as UX design?

Interaction design is one component of UX design. Interaction design focuses on the behaviour and dialogue between user and product, while UX design encompasses the whole experience, including research, information architecture, visual design, and content.

How does this area differ from human-computer interaction (HCI)?

HCI is an academic field within computing that studies interaction empirically and scientifically. Interaction and UX design, as treated here in design studies, is the practice-oriented craft of conceiving and refining interactive experiences; the two are closely related and mutually informing.

Interaction and UX Design

Interaction and user-experience design shape how people engage with digital products, services, and systems over time, designing behaviour, flow, and the quality of the overall experience.

Definition

Interaction and UX design is the practice of designing the behaviour of interactive products and the overall experience people have when using products, services, and systems.

Scope

This area covers interaction design (the design of behaviour and dialogue between people and interactive products), user-experience design (the broader quality of a person's whole experience with a product or service), usability and user research, information architecture, and service design. Treated here as a design-studies area, it draws on but is distinct from the computing discipline of human-computer interaction, emphasising the designerly craft of conceiving and refining experiences.

Sub-topics

Core questions

How should the behaviour and dialogue of an interactive product be designed?
What constitutes a good experience, and how can it be designed and evaluated?
How do user research and usability testing inform interaction decisions?
How do interaction and UX design relate to and differ from HCI as a science?

Key theories

User-centred design and affordances: Norman's principles of affordances, signifiers, mapping, feedback, and constraints provide a foundation for designing interactions that are discoverable and understandable, with errors anticipated and recoverable.
Goal-directed interaction design: Cooper and colleagues advocate designing interaction around users' goals, using personas and scenarios to structure behaviour so that products support what people are trying to achieve rather than merely exposing features.
Elements of user experience: Garrett organises UX into layered planes from abstract strategy and scope through structure and skeleton to the concrete surface, giving a model for how experience decisions build on one another.

History

Interaction design was named and shaped in the 1980s and 1990s as personal computing spread, with Bill Moggridge among those who coined the term. User-experience design, a phrase associated with Donald Norman, broadened the focus from interfaces to whole experiences, and the rise of the web and mobile devices in the 2000s established UX as a major professional design field.

Debates

Design craft versus engineering science: Whether interaction and UX design are primarily a designerly, craft-based practice of shaping experience or applications of HCI as an empirical engineering science, and how the two should relate in education and practice.

Key figures

Donald Norman
Alan Cooper
Jesse James Garrett
Bill Moggridge

Seminal works

norman2013
cooper2014
garrett2010

Frequently asked questions

Is interaction design the same as UX design?: Interaction design is one component of UX design. Interaction design focuses on the behaviour and dialogue between user and product, while UX design encompasses the whole experience, including research, information architecture, visual design, and content.
How does this area differ from human-computer interaction (HCI)?: HCI is an academic field within computing that studies interaction empirically and scientifically. Interaction and UX design, as treated here in design studies, is the practice-oriented craft of conceiving and refining interactive experiences; the two are closely related and mutually informing.