Interaction Design: Transition and State

Something that has always bothered me about Interaction Design is the fact that it is extremely hard to convey your message through a few wireframes. These wireframes might be good for indicating in which state a particular screen is in at that moment but this information is usually rather dull and certainly does not come alive to the viewer:

What you see in the image above is a state that the site (could be application or any other interactive interface) is in. It tells us very little of the interaction itself and I would daresay that as an Interaction Design is fairly useless.

What is very useful though, is the transition of frames or screens. The moments between States. This is where the magic of Interaction Design occurs. It can tell the designer how they can expect a particular interface to to behave and isn’t that what Interaction Design is all about: Designing Interface Behavior?

Here is an interesting clip in which paper protyping is being illustrated: