- User interface ideation
- User task analysis
- Storyboarding (both linear and animatic)
- Visual design (hand-drawn sketches, Illustrator, Photoshop, 3D rendering)
- Software interface prototyping (e.g., Director, Visual Basic)
- Web interface design (e.g., DHTML, Shockwave, Flash)
- Physical prototyping (e.g., Microcontrollers, Max)
- Interactive Exhibits

1. Introduction    
Interaction design is about creating plans of how users will interact with your product. Those plans can take the form of...

• Structure diagrams (such as "site maps" for a website)
• Process flow diagrams
• Wireframe diagrams of page or screen layouts
• Interactive prototypes
  Planning is essential before you start work on the user interface for a new product.

Interaction design can produce finished, fully detailed blueprints or much rougher prototypes suitable for early stage usability testing. Feedback from usability tests enables the interaction designer to enhance their design, turning it from a prototype to a final blueprint.

Developers and graphic designers can use those final  blueprints as the basis for their work. The project team can work more swiftly, with fewer costly misunderstandings about how the finished product is supposed to behave.

Essential ingredients
Interaction design is one area of the user-centred design lifecycle. To be truly effective it can't stand alone. It must rely on background research about its target users and the context of usage. Will users have a chance to practice using the product over time or will they only use it rarely? Will users be keen on technology or will they have no experience with computers at all? Answers to questions like these make a profound difference to the user interface.

Flow's interaction designers are experts in established user interface design principles based on ongoing academic research into what makes a successful user interface. They have experience in designing a broad range of interfaces and first hand knowledge of how people really use interactive products, gained through conducting usability tests.

2. Design Process
   
1. Research. Flow can conduct research for you, such as usability tests, competitor comparison tests, focus groups or a context study. Or we can rely on research you have conducted yourself.

2. Definition of users and project goals.

• Flow gathers information about the aims of the product and the business from the project stakeholders.
• We work with your team to create useful models of users and their goals. This usually takes place in a workshop.
• We work with your team to decide what the goals of the project are: how will we know when the product is usable?

3. Interface architecture and design. Armed with this understanding of your end users

• we are now ready to start specifying how the product should function. We can work alone, or do significant parts of the process in a workshops with your project team.
• We sketch out several designs and assess each one for merit against the user profiles and goals defined earlier.
• We select the best sketch or sketches and work them into prototypes, ready for usability testing.
• Prototypes can be generated in a range of formats including PowerPoint, Visio, HTML and JPEG/GIF. They can be interactive or just a series of flat pages.
• We usability test the prototypes to learn how users deal with them.
• We take the results of the testing, enhance the designs and usability-test them again. Eventually, feedback from usability tests will show that the design is a success.
• Flow can then document the design to create a fully detailed interaction specification (blueprint).

3. What You Get 
You will ultimately get a more usable, useful and competitive product. Design decisions will be less subjective and more confidently focused on the end user. Your team will have a single focus of their energies.

Each stage of the process will be presented to you in the most appropriate format for team communication and user input: presentation, report, or interactive prototype.

Documents might include:

• Task flow analysis of current processes
• Usage scenario descriptions and diagrams
• Remodelled task flows for the new product
• Product architecture diagrams
• Wireframe page/screen designs
• Detailed visual page/screen designs
• Clickable prototypes