Design By Candlelight

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?

Tags: Information Architecture, interaction design, interface design, naming conventions, nomenclature, User Experience