Interaction design and IA

Interaction designers and information architects define how interactive products are organised and what they do. They use everything from hand-drawn sketches to sophisticated software to get the job done.

Information architecture (IA) identifies relationships between the elements of information in a product. It delivers an efficient and useful structure for the user interface and defines effective navigation, interlinking and interface templates.

Interaction design goes further into the detail. It ensures that each element of the user interface is easy and delightful to use, and that the experience unfolds smoothly in response to people's actions.

Interaction design and IA are fundamental parts of Flow's user-centred design process. We believe it's essential to create interface prototypes and usability test them with the end users of the product in an iterative design process. It's the only reliable way to develop popular and profitable products.

How it works

Our architecture and design process is typically structured like this:

Concept creation

Flow works with you to review your existing product, your business objectives and your users' goals. In a concept workshop, the team comes up with ideas for relevant and innovative products. One or two different concepts can be sketched up ready for a round of user testing. The lessons learned from testing allow the team to move forward with a robust concept.

Detailed iterative design

Flow works with your team to identify key task flows, draw them up and optimise them using iterative usability testing. This defines how key parts of the product will work. From these we can define the templates and structure for the whole product. The visual design team works in parallel and later integrates their work with the interaction design, ready for hi-fidelity usability testing.

Blueprint

Flow and the visual design team complete the detailed specification document for the user experience.

Results

Our interaction design process involves our clients, via workshops and usability tests. We've found close involvement with the development team to be particularly important. As agile software development methodologies become increasingly popular we're getting great results from combining them with our interaction design process.

Depending on the needs of your project, Flow can produce different kinds of deliverables, from rough prototypes to bespoke user interface blueprints.

Typical ingredients for a user interface blueprint include:

• Interface or site map
• Content matrix
• Process or user journey diagrams
• Annotated interface wireframes
• Descriptions and diagrams of the functional behaviour of the product
• Interactive or paper prototypes
• Copy guidelines
• Complete page or screen templates
• Visual style guide and visual assets