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What’s the difference between information architecture, interaction design, visual design and usability engineering? I argue that each of these areas is critical in a design project but that they need to be co-ordinated by a User Experience Designer to ensure the end user's experience is a satisfying one.
There’s a memorable scene in ‘Monty Python’s Life of Brian’ where Brian tentatively approaches a small band of people led by John Cleese and asks: “Are you the Judean People’s Front?” After a few expletives, John Cleese explains that they’re not the Judean People’s Front — they’re The People’s Front of Judea. The sketch makes the point that what one person sees as a small difference, another person sees as a paradigm shift.
Sometimes I wonder if we’re getting into the same situation in the field of user experience. We define ourselves by roles that sound pretty similar to people that work outside the field — Information Architects, Interaction Designers, Visual Designers, Usability Engineers and User Experience Designers are just a handful of terms commonly used.
But what are the differences? And how do they work together?
Information architecture is concerned with how data are organised or structured from the user’s perspective — as opposed to the perspective of the system.
At the level of a web site, information architecture is concerned with defining the data on each page and how those pages relate to each other. For example, defining a site map is an information architecture activity. At the level of an individual page, information architecture is concerned with layout to ensure that data are logically grouped and interrelated.
Information architecture is also concerned with using and defining taxonomies (such as hierarchies) and classifying data within these taxonomies. So defining menus and navigational structures is an information architecture issue. The Information Architect’s job is made easier when he or she understands the way users and domain experts think about the information, so they use techniques like structured interviews and card sorting to get inside users’ heads.
Interaction design is concerned with the controls, mechanisms and processes that users need to perform their tasks with the system.
For example, the Interaction Designer determines whether we should have a menu rather than a set of tabs, whether we should have a drop down list rather than set of radio buttons and he or she will determine the steps for setting up a new email account using a wizard.
Interaction Designers are concerned with affordances: what controls and control mechanism do, and how this is communicated to users. As a consequence, you’ll often see Interaction Designers using or compiling pattern libraries to capture a particular interaction technique.
Visual design is concerned with the aesthetics of the interface. Visual Designers ensure the interface looks good and communicates the right type of ‘image’ to the users, including conformance to any brand or style guidelines.
Visual Designers often come from a graphic design background. Good Visual Designers often have excellent skills in illustration, animation, and photography, which they integrate into their interface design work.
Usability Engineers design and execute studies to test the usability of interfaces. They also make recommendations as to how to correct problems that their studies identify. These may be very specific like, “Make a stronger distinction between the ‘OK’ and ‘Cancel’ buttons”, or very general like: “The information architecture needs revisiting”.
To do this, Usability Engineers must be skilled in areas such as questionnaire design, interviewing and using specialist usability testing software (like Morae). The best Usability Engineers also have a good grounding in statistics so that they can apply the correct statistical methods and tests to quantitative study results. They are also familiar will relevant standards such as ISO 9241 and the Common Industry Format for Usability Testing (ANSI/NCITS 354-2001).
In an article published some time ago by Melisa Cooper (sadly no longer available online) she drew the analogy between a User Experience Architect (a term more popular than User Experience Designer in the 1990s) and that of a conventional architect who designs houses. So, that when designing a new house:
But someone needs overall responsibility for the design: leading and briefing all of those specialist roles, resolving the inevitable conflicts across these roles and generally ‘representing’ the home owner (not the builders) in the design process.
With a house, this is the role of the architect who conceives the whole experience for the home owner. With an interactive system, a User Experience Designer plays this analogous role. Just like a conventional architect, a User Experience Designer is the ‘senior professional’ on a project. (This means that they also need excellent generic business skills such as project management, interpersonal communication skills, presentation skills and facilitation skills).
In this article I have identified four specialist areas in user experience design: information architecture, interaction design, visual design and usability engineering. We can think of these as four lenses that the User Experience Designer will look through from time to time.
User Experience Designers have different levels of skill in each of these areas. When I coach or mentor User Experience Designers, I often ask them to rank themselves on a scale of 1-10 in each of these skill areas to help define their “UX profile”. I explain that:
Why not take some time to define your own UX profile?
Dr. Ritch Macefield (@Ax_Stream on Twitter) holds a BA in Creative Design, an MSc in IT/Computing and a PhD in HCI. He is an acknowledged expert in Axure having led Axure projects for clients like Thomson-Reuters, Dell computers and Vodafone. He was a panel speaker at Axure World 2012, contributed to the book “Axure RP 6 Prototyping Essentials” and founded the Axure RP Pro LinkedIn Group.
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