Notable Dos and Don’ts for Creating Interactive Design

Interactive design elements are important facets of understanding for anyone who designs, develops; create websites, social media sites or computer animations. The word interactive coupled with the design makes one think about things like iPhones and Web Pages. The do’s involve the answers to questions that are hard to pin down but basically hinge on reaching the most users and bringing them together with interactive software. For example, most of us have seen the small keys on certain texting devices.

 The artistic way to reach more people is to make bigger keys because most people have large fingers and don’t like the small keypads. This of course leads to the touch screen applications on the newer devices that reduce this problem even more. The interactive design is between the artist, the computer programmers and the screen engineers. 

The design ideas don’t or shouldn’t come from other companies but from the creative minds brainstorming on a better way. Perhaps it’s a way to transform an idea like voice recognition into something beyond a simple command.  Or a way to make objects communicate with each other without taking away our human comfort. 

On a practical level, there are Interactive Designers who want to help with your web design and keep it from being overlooked and underappreciated. If there are less and less visits maybe it’s because the page is loading too much information without making clear reference to what is happening. The befuddled user is just waiting and waiting while the hourglass keeps spinning and spinning. Maybe all that is needed is a tiny bit of communication right on the cover page explaining what will be loaded and how long it will take. Making things easy to find and tabs that look creative and inviting will create happier users who will know where to find what they need. 

Don’t overwhelm the user with too much information at once and allow them to read everything instead of pushing through lots of flashing artwork quickly. Confused users will start making mistakes or getting upset and may not visit again. There is also a program that can be added for form validation. Should the client or user make a mistake, an error message will spring up and remind them to correct the glitch or typo. 

The most notable Do’s and Don’ts for creating interactive design involves the processing of data. There is so much data swirling around us at all times and logging it and emailing it has become quite a challenge. Data overload used to be a fully stuffed filing cabinet and now there are not enough filing cabinets in the world to store everything. In fact, even the biggest filing cabinet would not be ideal because technology has advanced so that we can shrink things and reduce things and pull things from the past, reusing them today. Inventors today are succeeding because they take pieces of the past and interactively design things for tomorrow.