Interaction design is the practice of shaping how people and interactive systems communicate with each other: what the system shows, what the user can do, what happens next, and how the user knows it happened. It sits between understanding users (goals, tasks, mental models) and building software, and it is deliberately iterative — you sketch a concept, put it in front of someone, learn what breaks, and revise.
In this course the topic matters for two reasons. First, the core principles (visibility, feedback, constraints, consistency, affordances and signifiers) give you a shared vocabulary for critiquing desktop and mobile interfaces instead of calling them simply "good" or "bad." Second, prototyping is how those principles get tested cheaply: paper sketches, wireframes, clickable mockups and higher-fidelity mockups each trade effort for realism, and each is useful at a different stage. A prototype is also a communication artifact — it lets you show a teammate, client or test participant an idea that words alone would not pin down.
As you watch, keep a running list of three things: concrete examples of designs that succeed or fail and the principle that explains why; the stages of the design process and where prototypes and user feedback enter the loop; and the difference between what an interface affords and what it merely appears to afford. You will use all three when you build your own low-to-mid fidelity prototype.
An introductory lecture defining interaction design as a field and distinguishing it from related areas such as HCI, UX and usability. Based on its title and chapter structure, it works through examples of poor design and references classic HCI material, including the Xerox PARC copier ethnography study, to show why designers must understand users in context. Expect coverage of foundational goals and principles that interaction designers work toward.
It is the natural starting point for the topic, establishing the vocabulary and motivating examples that the rest of the module builds on, and it is part of a structured HCI lecture series rather than a one-off clip.
The follow-up lecture in the same series, focused on the interaction design process itself. Its description points to the Double Diamond framework from the Design Council and the Design Squiggle, both of which illustrate how design moves between divergent exploration and convergent decision-making. Expect discussion of the activities involved — establishing requirements, designing alternatives, prototyping and evaluating — and how they repeat rather than run once.
This video directly addresses iterative design and where prototyping sits within the larger process, which is the conceptual backbone of the prototyping subtopics in this module.
A short, focused explainer from the Interaction Design Foundation on affordances: what an object or interface element communicates about how it can be used. The video explains the concept through a worked example and connects it to designing apps that users can operate without instruction. Expect brief treatment of how perceived affordances and visual signifiers guide action.
Affordances are one of the core interaction design principles you will be expected to apply in a prototype, and IxDF is a well-established UX education producer, so this gives a concise and reliable treatment of a single high-value concept.
These videos mainly support MO5: the first two establish the interaction design principles and the iterative, prototype-driven process you will follow when constructing a low-to-mid fidelity prototype for a desktop or mobile context, while the affordances video supplies a specific principle your prototype should demonstrate. They also reinforce MO2, since examples of bad design and the discussion of affordances both illustrate what happens when a system's behavior does not match the model a user forms from its appearance. The process lecture further connects to MO4 by showing where evaluation and user feedback belong in the design cycle, setting up the comparison between expert-driven methods and user testing covered elsewhere in the module.
These videos were chosen from YouTube on October 3, 2026. Each has captions; the player turns them on. Videos on YouTube can be changed or removed — if one no longer plays, tell your instructor. If a player does not appear, use its Watch on YouTube link.