Who’s Experience is it Anyway?
I have gotten asked a lot in interviews lately. “So what are you? Do you consider yourself IA or IxD?” And I find myself asking, “Does it matter?”
I have to ask all UX professionals everywhere, “Why the divide?” Aren’t we as professionals in User Experience supposed to be about the design of that experience no matter the medium?
You could argue, much like Marshall McLuhan, “The medium is the message!” After all a content rich site is going to need a good IA to wrangle all that content but then that IA needs to also create the interface for the user to interact with all that content. Isn’t the interaction design?
On the flip side, you may have an interaction designer working on a content rich site such as CBS News is going to need to know how to wrangle all that content in order to increase find-ability. Isn’t that Information Architecture?
How much are we really different from each other? And does it really matter? In the end isn’t it all about the user and their experience anyway?
User Experience
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Information Architecture, interaction design, interface design, naming conventions, nomenclature, User Experience
Themocracy
Traditionally, IA was based on Human Factors, while IxD was rooted in Action Research Design. So, while both centre improving the overall experience that people will have while visiting a product, they have different methodologies on the best method.
An example of what I mean is IxD people can work on systems with abstracted information much easier than IAs (Smart Houses for instance), all they need is things that interact with other things.
However, that being said, realistically the terms seem to be selected by whatever the individual thinks sounds cooler, and not by the practices that
Also, food for thought. Isn’t it a bit fascist to believe we can control a users experience?
Also, Interaction Design isn’t Interface Design.
That may be but I would argue that the industry has grown (as most things do). At this point I would say it’s a time for unity and to focus on some standards within the industry, which is my whole point. I wasn’t saying anything about controlling the user’s experience but focusing on creating the best experience for the user and part of that is utilizing user testing and all the foundations that the practice has been built on. Having been the BA, IA, VD, UEA, IxD, I am much more about building on what you know and not worrying about the details of what’s what.