5 Characteristics of Bad Interaction Design That You Must Avoid｜Ariel Chang

We are living in a world that is full of touch devices and infinite scrolling websites. Therefore, as a designer, it is inevitable for him/her to have a clear understanding of interaction design before setting out to create fluid, convenient and accessible user experiences, because most websites and applications are interactive today to avoid making bad interaction designs.

---

Author: Julie

The concept of interaction design was created in 1980s. Interaction designers usually focus on user-centered design, based on the analysis and research of real users’ goals and demands. Interaction designers always make design from users’ perspective, but at the same time they try to balance the users’ needs with business goals & technological capabilities. However, many interaction designers ignore these key points, finally they make something terrible. In order to give a better understanding of interaction design, I would like to share with you about what kind of interaction design can be seemed as a terrible interaction design.

1. Hard-to-find navigation options

I believe that you must have such experience, when you are browsing a website or using an app, you spend a lot of time on finding one navigation option, but finally it is at an insignificant place. This is a bad interaction design example. An unremarkable option would waste a large number of time and energy. At last, users would lose their patience. Your navigation options should be set out clearly, because they can reflect what are the basic functions of your product. Remember, don’t confuse your users.

2. Complicated operations and bad usability

As I said before, the heart of interaction design is user experience. For those who firstly enter your website or use your App, if your design is too complicated to understand for them, they would definitely dislike your bad interaction design. Any product would take usability first, because the reason why users choose your product is that they want to realize their goals and demands easily. Just like UX & interaction designers, they also need to consider the inherent usability of the interfaces to make the underlying system to comprehend and use. The apps also should consolidate a multi-step or multi-program process and transform the whole experience into a single linear path. If users need to invest much time into learning the system and operation, they would possibly give up your bad design product.

3. Inappropriate connection

When you make an easy-to-operate interaction design, which means you already have half success. However, when it comes real, some interaction designers always ignore some details. Here is a bad interaction design: Users want to enter the feedback interface, but after they click the option, the address of company appears. As the old saying goes, details determine success or failure. Such mistakes wouldshow your unreliability of users. Once you find your mistakes, you’ve already lost a lot of users’ feedback. That would definitely do harm to the development of your company.

4. Terribly Arranged Components & Ugly typography

This importance of typography of pages and components cannot be ignored. Sometimes, we might click two popups to make us view different information at one time. However, designers would forget to make right typography of these two popups, thus causing one cover another, or when user clicks a popup, another would disappear. Finally, users have to exit one popup to open another. Repeating this action would make users uncomfortable. A good interaction design would simplify users’ operation, not make the opposite.

5. Illogical interactive ideas

What kind of interactive thinking can be seen as inappropriate? If the interactive thinking can’t satisfy the thinking habits of users, then it would be a terrible interactive thinking, finally designer would work out a terrible interaction design. An appropriate interactive thinking should guarantee a fluid design process, and a fluid design process should be based on an excellent prototyping tool. Excellent prototyping tools should have some advantages like abundant components, easy operation, and humanization to make sure the designers have good design thinking and work out great interactive design. There are some popular prototyping tools for you: Axure, Mockplus and Justinmind.

Conclusion

The listed 5 bad interaction designs above are common problems we might find out in our daily life, so I hope designers who read this article can take this as a warning that they must master enough skills of interaction design. Designers should always remember that an excellent designer should not only take customer sales as their goal, take improving clicks as their targets, but also design something that have strong accessibility which can really satisfy and be helpful for users.