Designing for Interaction: Tools and Techniques to Perfect the Online Experience

Presenting your customers with more immersive and interactive Web interfaces can elicit excitement, loyalty and plenty of referring traffic. Many companies beat their competitors by offering a more innovative and refined interaction style: Facebook overtook MySpace, Going.com beat Upcoming.org, Flickr surpassed Snapfish, and Yelp replaced the Yellow Pages. If you ask, your customers might not say responsiveness is important to them, but it’s evident by looking at sites that succeed. A web site that is more responsive to customer input creates a stickier platform; one that rewards their input with immediate feedback and creates a mild state of Flow .

Conversely, sites that are frustrating to use and slow to render lead to customer dissatisfaction, site abandonment, and significant loss in overall sales. Studies indicate keeping interactions within 2 seconds will keep customers engaged; whereas half of all people waiting more than 8 seconds (typically shorter than a full page refresh) will lose interest and drop off . But if you can execute well, your customers will reward your innovation with their loyalty, increased conversion, and decreased abandonment. In this perspective, we’ll look at some important new technologies that can help you deliver a dynamic, feature-rich experience to your customers, and offer some tips to help you decide when and how to deploy them.

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