Interaction cost?
I’m reading the book Practical UI by Adham Dannaway which is helping me in answering many design question I had earlier. As I progress with the book I will share some of the lessons I find insightful. I recommend this book for anyone who has interest in UI/UX.
Adham defines Interaction cost as follows
Interaction cost is the sum of physical and mental effort required to achieve a task. Looking, scrolling, searching, reading, clicking, waiting, typing, thinking, and remembering all add to interaction cost.
One might ask why should we minimize interaction cost, it is cause the higher the interaction cost, the harder it is for someone to achieve their task. And we want our user to perform tasks with ease and less effort to make their experience great in our product.
The good news is we can measure the cost so that we can minimize it. We count each scroll, search, click …, the user is expected to take to perform that task. Then we design our product with the smallest cost.
Here are the 3 guidelines stated on the book to minimize the cost
Keep related actions close
Keep actions close to the element they relate to and try to ensure they have a sufficient target area.
Reduce distractions
Attention grabbing distractions like animated banners, pop-ups, and unnecessary visuals, can pull people’s attention away from the task they’re trying to complete.
Minimize choice
Reduce choices users has to speed up decision process the user take to accomplish a task.
If you really are interested in this topic checkout this article too →
Here is the book if you are interested in reading.
