Andrew Chee — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:57 GMT

At my current gig, those being hired to focus on information architecture, interaction design, interface design, usability and everything in between, to ultimately create interactive products, are called Experience Designers. Can you guess the cool new acronym for that one?

At first, I thought it was a bit silly to create yet another title for a role that, until recently, was understood by most people I knew in the industry as IA. But after just a few days in the role, the title is starting to make a lot of sense to me. If you are focusing on any one of the aforementioned tasks in your job, you are working to improve user experience. And if you are doing all of those tasks, then you are in effect designing experience.

What I’m getting at is that I believe that most here are designing the entire user experience, whether their actual title is IA or IxD or whatever. But more important than job titles and acronyms, is the need to define the separate tasks that create a solid and thoroughly designed user experience because all of those tasks need to be addressed in your ideas, processes and deliverables.

So tomorrow, we may call all of this something different, but the concepts will remain the same. And today, thinking about the IA process as 4 general themes and the IxD process in 5 concentrations definitely helps me to make sure I cover all of those thoroughly when I design. And to think of the master list of tasks as 2 separate processes (whose threads often run in parallel) helps to keep a complicated problem and a tight schedule trackable and conquerable.

But imho, I do think that it’s a bit early for any organization that is gearing up for web projects to specifically hire both IAs and IxDs as distinct roles and god forbid, staff them on the same project. They can throw whatever acronyms they want in their title, but they better be covering both processes. In product design, this may be different.

Btw, I think the wikipedia helps as well, if you look at it as a start in defining this profession (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_experience, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interaction_design and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_architecture).

Thanks for a great article, looking forward to the rest.

Andrew Chee — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:53:06 GMT

This is one of the best articles I’ve read here. Quantitative analysis, if you will, for an area typically ruled by the heavy hand of subjectivism. The only other material that I’ve read with solid theories on this subject (and this may give you an idea of how much more I need to read on this), from a different angle, was from the classic “Designing Visual Interfaces” by Mullet and Sano.

I’d like to second the comment made by Dustin Hamilton calling for use of this theory as an integral part of design technique. For instance, it would be highly valuable to set the direction in the experience planning phase, rather than after GD’s run even their first iteration.

Nevertheless, while I completely see the value of this technique, when you’re on a tight schedule/budget, this type of analysis tends to become a luxury. Perhaps you have a few examples of real-world systems that employ optimal iconography (produced utilizing these techniques or even luckily complying with these theories by way of intuition alone)? Case studies reinforcing best practices have done well for me as part of a conceptual business sell when you don’t have time or budget for your own analysis.

Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Andrew Chee