Circling back to the topic of unsolicited redesigns, the discussion over at Branch largely talks on one of the points I mentioned last week – focusing on visual instead of interaction.

Looking at the existing screens of a product (be it a web site, web app, mobile app or desktop app) and making them prettier is all about visual design. Playing with colors, fonts, alignments, paddings, margins, gaps – or adding crisp stock photography – is a very visceral way to show your skills as a visual designer. This process sometimes omits certain technical aspects, such as, say the impact on the loading time and network (monthly bill) consumption, limitations of the underlying platform and the impact on framerate for some transitions, font rendering capabilities that can make your nice typography look quite bad and more.

But what about the interaction design? What about taking a hard look at some of the products you’re using on the daily basis and seeing how you can smooth the bumps that you encounter along the way of completing a certain task.

How about the process of finding the certain episode of your favorite TV show, buying it and watching it? How many screens does it take? How many taps, swipes and flings does it take? How much do you type on that small virtual keyboard? How much of that annoyance can you shave away without degrading the functionality scope?

What about making an hotel reservation? Direct messaging somebody on Twitter? Muting an annoying hash tag? Finding what is the closest movie theater that is playing The Hobbit in HFR 3D? Buying a ticket to that movie? Bookmarking the location of that movie theater? Navigating to that theater a few hours later? Taking a few pictures of yourself and your friends in the theater lobby and creating a booth-style photo strip? Ordering a pizza after you get back home?

There’s plenty of apps that do these tasks. You can redesign the outer layer of each one of those. But what about looking at the navigation models of each one, really looking at them and trying to improve them? Talking about what bothers you in the particular flow, showing how you restructure it and convincing the reader that your changes are an actual improvement? Taking those changes and applying them to the rest of the app? Making those change consistently better across various form factors where larger devices may combine two or more smaller screens at the time?

This is not shiny. This is not sexy. Interaction designers operate on the level of wireframes and flow charts that show transitions between various screens.  A vibrant pixel-perfect mock with glamorous stock photography is visceral. Easy to look at. Easy to consume. Easy to understand the change. A wireframe that rearranges the content to move some things above the fold, or group related things is not. It takes time to understand. Words from you to describe why your change is better. Attention from the reader to look at how things were arranged before, how they are arranged now and what is your reasoning behind this.