Problem

Working with an overseas development and UX team, I needed to figure out a better way to hand off my designs. In 2017, I developed a whole new way to document interaction design: Interaction Flows.

I had just read this article on Nielsen and Norman on Wireflows, which argued for the fusion of user/task flows and wireframes. While they show processes and relationships in a simple way, user flows don’t show how the visual elements provide entry points into each page or how they facilitate the user’s goals. 

Wireframes are great for laying out those visual elements, but by themselves, they are not very descriptive of the relationship or flow between pages.

I looked back on the microinteractions framework from Dan Saffer’s book and thought: why not combine these two awesome approaches? Why not define the triggers/rules/feedback/loops/modes in the wireflow?

Thus birthed the Interaction (IX) Flow.