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Inferring intent

devouringdetails.com · 866 words · saved by 1 readers

What even is interaction design? Here's how I think about it through the lens of technology. Interaction design is an artform to make experiences that fluidly respond to human intent. Our north star as designers is to make the layer between software and user intent really thin. 1 Inferred intent is usually the invisible driving force behind interactions that people tend to describe as "magical" as if someone read your mind and predicted what you wanted to do without asking. You might experience Apple Maps displaying the active route navigation without unlocking, Apple Wallet increasing the brightness when presenting a pass for scanning, or Spotify adjusting the interface to be more accessible while driving. These are all examples of inferred intent. Inferred interactions usually solve a tedious pain point when you need it the most. For example, on the Vercel dashboard you can enter environment variables for a project. Vercel recognised that people don't want to fill them in one by one—

Devouring Details Have you ever noticed that some animation sequences can be improved with just a touch of delay? Or that some interactions just feel better without any motion at all? Devouring Details is an interactive reference manual for interaction-curious designers, containing 23 chapters with 23 downloadable React components. All footage is recorded of React components Platform Before working on this I thought to myself: “how have I learned myself?” By trying to build an idea and realising it sucks in practice. With enough iterations and sometimes by accident I’ll get to a place where it

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