What is Interaction Design?

Interaction gives users the ability to change the canvas, to directly manipulate. Designing those interactions is what makes our software come to life. Interactions should provide affordance — animation, for examples (opens new window), can be used as a powerful metaphor for helping a user understand an interface. Interactions help guide a user from the beginning of a task through it's completion.

Designers guide these interactions from prototype to implementation. For web applications we start in the browser. For review, we use gifs (opens new window) to demonstrate interactions.