What is UX (User Experience Design)?
The main motto of UX Design is to design a product in a way that makes it easy to use, is useful, and offers delightful interaction. The primary goal of UX Design is to generate satisfaction and in turn induce loyalty in the customer. The main target of UX design is curating the experience that a customer feels while interacting with the product.
What is Interactive Design?
Interactive Design or IxD is the process by which the interaction between the product and the users is designed. The end goal of Interactive Design is the creation of a product that would allow users to effectively interact with the product to achieve their goals efficiently. Interaction Design seeks to nurture a meaningful relationship between the user and the physical/digital product or services they use.
Difference between UX Design and Interactive Design
UX Design is responsible for shaping the entire experience that a consumer is going to have regarding a product. Whereas Interactive design focuses solely on the moment of interaction between the user and the product ensuring a pleasant experience at the moment. So in simple terms, Interactive Design falls under the umbrella term of UX Design.
Let us try and understand it with the help of an example. Let us take a hypothetical situation where you have to call someone using your phone. Interactive design deals with those specific moments in which the user dials the number and talks over the phone. UX design, however, is responsible for the entire experience the user had while using the phone. Whether the phone was comfortable in hand or whether the design was ergonomic or if the touch screen functioned properly. Basically, it deals with whether all the functions were performed by the phone like it was designed to.
Now if we notice carefully, we will see that interactive design is responsible for just a part of the entire process. While UX design is about the entire process. This clearly denotes that UX design encompasses interactive design.
How do User experience and Interactive Design work together?
It is not possible to create a phenomenal User Experience without Interactive Design and vice versa. Both UX and Interactive design have a few stages of design that they work on together to deliver the best possible User Experience to the customers.
The stages are:
- Understand: Understand what the business and the stakeholders need from the product. Get a grasp of their vision and objectives.
- UX Research: Empathetic research to understand both the user and the competitors make up this stage.
- Generate Ideas: Brainstorming ideas is a stage that is aided greatly if UX designers and Interactive designers join forces.
- Design: This leads to the building of the prototype for testing out.
- Test: This is usually conducted under controlled environments with both UX and Interactive designers closely monitoring.
