User Experience Design and Interactive Design

The understanding of the content of a website often depends on the understanding of how the website works and displays, and this is called the user experience design, a part of user-oriented design. User experience is related to layout, clear instructions, easy navigation and labeling on a website. How well a user understands how he/she can interact on a site may also depend on the interactive design, in general it may also be called human-computer interaction. If a user perceives the usefulness of the website, he/she is more likely to continue using it and stay in longer each session. Users who are skilled and well versed with the use of a website may find a more distinctive, yet less intuitive or less user-friendly website interface useful nonetheless. However, users with less experience are less likely to see the advantages, the beauty or usefulness of a less intuitive website interface. This drives the trend for a more universal user experience, look and feel and ease of access to accommodate as many users as possible regardless of user skills. Much of the user experience design and interactive design are in the process of the user interface design of the website design.

Advanced interactive functions may require plug-ins if not advance coding language skills or it is an effective replacement. Choosing whether or not to use interactivity that requires plug-ins is a considerable and selectable decision in user experience design. If the plug-in doesn’t come pre-installed with most browsers, it will be a bad decision as there is a risk that the user will have neither the know how or the patience to install and use a plug-in just make a website more functions. If the function requires advanced coding language skills, it may be too costly in either time or money for the designer to code compared to amount of enhancement the function will add to the user experience by using outside components. There is also a risk that advanced interactivity may be incompatible with older browsers, low resolution screen or hardware configuration. Publishing a function that doesn’t work reliably is reputation lost and potentially worse for the user experience than making no attempt. It depends on the target audience if it is likely to needed, useful or worth any risks.