The Interface: Where Interactivity Lives

Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) tends to approach interactivity as a design challenge:
How can we make systems efficient, intuitive, safe, and satisfying? This leads to the creation of user-oriented interfaces. Interfaces are where choices are offered and denied, and the creation of these spaces isn’t just solely functional; they are persuasive as well. 

From a rhetorical perspective, interactivity also constitutes meaning-making. It’s about how systems guide behavior, shape understanding, and quietly suggest what counts as “normal” use. These suggestions allow them to create a flow that is unique and structured, tailored to each interface for the person interacting with it. 

Interactivity as Persuasion

In online spaces, every system you can interact with exerts some degree of persuasion on users. 

•  A YouTube “like” button nudges you toward approval instead of disagreement. (The dislike button was removed.)
• The infinite scroll of TikTok encourages you to keep going mindlessly for hours on end without stopping.
• A drop-down menu limits the choices you have available before you can even think about making one. 

The interactive nature of these features imbues users with a sense of empowerment. It gives us something to do and often makes us feel good about doing it. But this empowerment is conditional. The system already predetermined every possible action we could take. Which actions will be rewarded, which will be feasible, and which don’t exist at all were already decided before we even got a say. 

So when we say a system is interactive, we should probably also ask:

• Who designed this interaction?
• What behaviors does it encourage?
• What alternatives are quietly unavailable?

Users, Power, and the Illusion of Control

Both HCI and rhetoric care deeply about users. HCI focuses on usability and user satisfaction; rhetoric focuses on power, access, and agency. Where they overlap is the idea of user empowerment, the belief that systems should serve people, not the other way around.

But empowerment isn’t just about ease of use. A system can be very usable and still deeply controlling. Interactivity can give the feeling of choice while tightly scripting outcomes.

Think about recommendation algorithms. You interact with them constantly, clicking, watching, skipping, but the system is also learning from you, steering future options, and narrowing what you see. That’s interactivity, yes. But it’s also persuasion operating quietly in the background.

Why Interactivity Deserves a Closer Look

Interactivity often gets framed as an inherently desirable trait. More interactivity equals more engagement, more freedom, and more user-friendliness and retention. While this is undeniably true in some cases, interactivity is often a more sophisticated way of guiding our behavior without calling attention to the hand that guides. 

If one is to analyze the idea of interactivity through a rhetorical lens, one must picture it not just as a feature but as a relationship between the user and the designer. To put it bluntly, interactivity isn’t just what you can do; it’s what you’re encouraged to do. And also importantly, what you are never invited to do in the first place. 

Interactivity is something we expect in most platforms we engage with. It is a process that feels natural, invisible, even. But that logic is precisely why we should pay more attention to the systems we interact with. The more seamless our interactions with technology are, the easier it is to forget that these interactions were planned and designed by someone for some reason. 

Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) tends to approach interactivity as a design challenge:
How can we make systems efficient, intuitive, safe, and satisfying? This leads to the creation of user-oriented interfaces. Interfaces are where choices are offered and denied, and the creation of these spaces isn’t just solely functional; they are persuasive as well. 

From a rhetorical perspective, interactivity also constitutes meaning-making. It’s about how systems guide behavior, shape understanding, and quietly suggest what counts as “normal” use. These suggestions allow them to create a flow that is unique and structured, tailored to each interface for the person interacting with it.