Interaction Design
The design of how an interface behaves — what responds to what, in what order, with what feedback, and what happens when something goes wrong.
Design DisciplinesInteraction design is concerned with behaviour rather than appearance: the states a control moves through, the timing of feedback, what is disabled and why, how errors surface and recover. The full state coverage is the craft — a control specified only in its default state is not designed, because loading, empty, error, partial and disabled are where users actually get stuck.
It sits between UX design, which decides what the product should do, and UI design, which decides what it looks like. Motion design is often its output, since transitions are how a system explains cause and effect.
In practice
A cross-chain swap showed a spinner from submission to confirmation, sometimes ninety seconds. Before: users refreshed and double-submitted. After replacing the spinner with named stages and a cancel affordance, double-submissions effectively stopped. The catch — exposing stages meant naming failures honestly, which surfaced a bridge error the team had been hiding.
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You may ask
Frequently Asked Questions
How is interaction design different from UI design?
Interaction design decides behaviour — what happens on click, how long feedback takes, how errors recover. UI design decides the visual form that behaviour takes. The same interaction can be dressed in very different interfaces.
What states should every component specify?
At minimum default, hover or focus, active, disabled, loading, error and empty. On data-driven components add partial and stale. Missing states are the most common source of bugs handed to engineering.
Related terms
All terms- UI DesignThe design of what a user sees and operates — layout, type, colour, iconography and the visual states of every control.
- UX DesignThe design of how a product works from the user's point of view — what it does, in what order, and how it behaves when things go wrong.
- Motion DesignThe design of movement in an interface — transitions, feedback and animation — used to explain change rather than to decorate it.
- PrototypingBuilding a simulated version of a product or flow — from paper to clickable to coded — in order to test an idea before committing to it.
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