Interaction designers own timing, pacing and rhythm. Yet our work practice lacks appropriate tools and vocabulary. How do you portray a groove in a wireframe, flow chart, or PowerPoint deck? This is becoming critically important as things like transitions, animation, hover responses and video make their way into more and more interactive experiences. This is in your future. This session builds on “The Rhythm of Interaction,” a popular and inspirational talk from Interaction 11 in Colorado. First we’ll introduce the concepts of Interactive and Motivic Rhythm, touch on how they relate to Flow, and then dive into techniques for designing pacing, tempo and rhythm into our interfaces. We will also examine what makes these elements fail or succeed, and explore how you can know when your design is doing it right. Of course that means seeing how your users respond. But it also has implications for the mental model you seek to induce in your users. Rhythmic experiences can share characteristics with machinery, music, drama, or organisms. Your choice of rhythmic style, and how it’s expressed, can set up predictable behavior patterns and foster intuitions and extrapolations that will result in an engaging, rewarding experience
