In today’s digital world, people spend more time on the internet than anything else. From ordering groceries to binge-watching movies, we are doing everything online making the virtual world a reality. Businesses, in turn, are trying to make the user experience more interactive and interesting.
Interaction design aims at developing digital products and services that go beyond mere product features to include how a user will interact with them. Studying user experience and interactive design is an important part of ensuring the success of your digital career.
UX is a broad field to explore and let’s see how you can learn interaction design by focusing on the basics and hitting the right notes.
- Understand UX and interaction design
The first step to learning a new language is understanding what it is and its basic features. You must know that interaction design is the practice of designing products that explores how a user might interact with them. The goal of interactive design is to make the digital experience more interesting, interactive and fun for the users.
- Design thinking process
Interaction design is about finding creative and innovative solutions to various design problems. Focus on the problems of users and understand them through polls or surveys and sketch solutions for these problems. This can help in reaching the target audience of your product or service.
- Learn various tools and operation languages
As an interaction designer, you must use various tools and programming languages such as Adobe XD, Sketch, Axure, InVision, etc. These tools help you to design prototypes, and patterns and plan user journeys and interactions. An understanding of these tools helps the learning process of interaction design easier.
- Start networking with other interaction designers
Creating networks and connections is important in the learning process. Following blogs of other UX and interactive designers help you understand their journey and learn from it. Developing connections is a constant source of education and aids in your development as an interaction designer.
Career opportunities
Once you learn the essential skills and are confident about using them effectively, it is time to venture into various job roles in the digital sector. Let’s look at some of them.
- User experience analyst
User experience analysts source data and conduct surveys to understand the requirements of the user when they visit a website. This is in turn used in the designing process to draw traffic.
- Interactive designer
An interactive designer develops services and products that engage with the audience and evoke their interest.
- User experience developer
A UX developer designs the journey a user undertakes from the front end of a website.
- Front-end developer
As a front-end developer, you must use designs, programming, and technology to define a website’s appearance and make the interaction easier for users.
A career in any of these fields earns you an average annual salary of $51,700 for entry-level positions and up to $76,000 as the career progresses. If you are looking for a lucrative and equally interesting career, then user experience and interactive design is the way forward.
This article is written by Anu Augustine.
