So whether here on twitter or through other chats, we've been having this heavy discussion regarding the place of IA and IxD and User Experience (Design) among other things and how to structure or change its positioning.

I think Twitter has lost it's mojo for this conversation so I'm suggesting we take it here on Branch. Worked well for a previous conversation about a similar DTDT topic so I'm happy to try again.

Agreed; we've been hitting our heads on 140 characters.

I think that part of what we are all reaching for is that if "UX designer" is a job title, it's a title of convenience rather than a usefully specific name for what a person actually does.

A silversmith smiths silver. A blacksmith smiths iron. A programmer writes code. A software designer designs software. An interaction designer designs interactions. An experience designer wears hip clothes and works hard to impress people.

Is my snark showing?

Alan, while I get where you are going w/ the snark, it doesn't beg the question, If an interaction designer designs interactions (What's an "interaction"?) why can't an experience designer design experiences?

But what is more interesting is that we are actually speaking about the phrase "user experience" design which to me has not always been a synonym or has contexts where it isn't synonym with "experience design".

The context for me that has always been relevant is the term "user" (yes, it's bad substitute for human being, but it is easier to say). I do wonder if this bridge being crossed is part of the problem, or at least another facet of the problem space. ...

... UX at one point meant everything that informed the collection of interactions that go into an interface. Now it is being used as a synonym with both Experience Design and Service Design despite attempts like this one to try and maintain separation: vimeo.com by Engine in the UK.

But we get off the point a little bit because from this thread and earlier conversations there are two themes:
1) @cwodtke's contention that IA and IxD are the same (now)
2) That the architectural aspects of IA and the design aspects of IxD are what helps to maintain their separation.

To #1 I feel very strongly that they are different. I have done a lot of IxD in my day w/o a lick of thinking about IA in any meaningful way and I have done a ton of IA without thinking about IxD in any meaningful way either. ...

...
#2 is just weird to me. From my perspective the differences between arch and design are so much less than the total differences between IA and IxD. It's not that there aren't differences, but as any classical anthropologist will tell you ... The differences between any categorized distinct groups will be less than the differences found among those that identify themselves as being within those separate groups. So it begs the new question ... "What value do we get out of a distinction?"

I'll let that simmer and sit for a minute.

Dave, you know I fundamentally agree with you on this stuff. CW's usage of IA seems expansive and de-clarifying to me, too, though I respect the impulse behind it. We need to talk about the difference between Big and Little, structural design thinking and tactical design work.

And you know that I think that if "UX design" is useful at all, it's as a "big tent" description of the whole ball of wax of design for stuff with computers.

I find the distinction between IxD and IA useful.

One of the key underlying questions we have is how to think and talk about the big product/service level design thinking which underlies the pick-and-shovel work of IA/IxD/SxD/etc. I feel a temptation to think of it as Big IxD, but I suspect that's unhelpful. Similarly I see CW tempted to think of it as Big IA --- and I respect how that's grounded in the profounder sense of IA as conceived before the web --- but I think that starts to stretch IA out of shape.

We all dislike and feel stuck with UXD as a term. I think if it's worth anything, we should use it to refer to that Big, strategic design thinking where the finder disciplines of IA, IxD, SxD, etc start to overlap and mush together.

Personally, I'd almost be OK w/ the term UX being used as the big tent umbrella term, but how do we keep people from using it to mean a person. It has to mean everything and only everything. We can't at once say it only means digital or only means these disciplines and not others b/c then you'll just be ostracizing those that overlap but add the "others" into their equation.

I will admit though that when I do this exercise I then fall back onto isn't just "design"?

Indeed.

If UXD isn't to just mean "design", it ought to mean "design including digital stuff".

I'll preëmpt Alan and point out that in the long run, that WILL mean everything soon enough!

While digital has brought to our attention a new hierarchy of complexity, that understanding is being applied to all manner of design whether or not digital is part of the context or not. So I'd argue again, UX again is just design. E.g. we are teaching UX principles as a core foundation to doing things like baby equipment, furniture, architectural systems, business processes, transportation systems, etc. And in practice this is being done as well.

So again, I'm left with, "It's just a way of doing good design."

Now, this isn't to say that there shouldn't be communities of people coalescing around specific media such as web, software, devices, services, etc. This makes great sense to me and it is also OK that these overlap and collaborate often. But UX is not a useful descriptor of much of what we do any more as it offers no clarity, no differentiation, and no specification.

Well that was my original objection to "experience design" in the expansive sense, which just seemed like a synonym for "design". At that point it just becomes un-useful.

I think I'm coming to the conclusion that, since we cannot seem to rid ourselves of the term "UX design", our objective should be a clarified definition of it that is useful for something and maps roughly to how it's currently used in the wild.

Folks outside of digital don't talk much about UXD, folks in digital do, which is why I think it may be useful to make it explicitly digital, even though the actual words don't allude to the digital.

I'd rather be rid of "UX design" because of the clarity/definition/specification problem, but it can still be marginally useful. One can say, "What kind of UX design does this system need?" That doesn't buy us much over "what kind of design does this system need?" but it does buy us something --- it's clear that we are not talking about the design of data structures, code, protocols, and other stuff that software development organizations could mean by "design".

Why is @cooper defending "user experience"?
It makes no sense to me, this article, let alone a series.
Has the marketplace moved in such a direction as to require it?

Interesting, I hadn't seen that.

That piece looks targeted at would-be clients rather than the design community, no?

yes, but still, the community has to react, respond, integrate, ignore, etc. we can't be talking to ourselves and the world in different tongues.

Good question, Dave. Why *IS* @Cooper defending "user experience"? As far as I can tell, it's because the term is the most broadly accepted one for what we do. Is that not true?

Yes, it is ... so I guess the next question is how to make it not just "used" but "usable", no?

My nit, so far, is I don't know if it can be made "usable" for enough of the contexts that the term has to work in. E.g. there is no such thing as a UX Degree. Not a single school has hung it's hat on that moniker. This makes hiring squirrelly as well as some other bureaucratic stuff (and I know how much you love bureaucracies).

My point is that UX "wins" b/c it is easy. Non-confrontational and squishy. But it looses big when you really have to get behind and use the darn thing. It's like we're trying to create a ComicCon which as we know today has little to do with Comics and is really just geek fandom.

Oh! and there are a host of reasons why it will probably never be used to describe a formal degree. (forgot to say that part). Too many to go into here.

I just found this thread on Branch, proving they are not so good at alerting one.

First, Architecture vs Design. This is really @abbytheia's balliwick, not mine. Design, as I understand it, is a plan for making. eleganthack.com

But in our context of interactive work, design is often used to mean visual design, and architecture for larger planning efforts. With this logic, IXD should be IXA. But whatever. English is great, because it adapts to how we talk.

Second *I* don't define IA broadly, RSW, Maria Guidice, Clemet Mok etc did before the polar bear narrowed it down.
The people who call themselves IA's and the people who call themselves IXDs are usually doing the same kind of stuff. After a while the slash died and now it's UX.

And finally I left the language wars a while back, because I have had the clear-as-crystal titles of Product Manager and General Manager (that is irony, if you missed it.)

As someone who hires these people, I don't give a flying f*ckwhat they call themselves. I want to hire as few as possible, as talented as possible. This means I have the equivalent of apartment hunting: cheap, location, size: pick two. For me, it's IxD, Graphic Design, IA (and I might want to put in dev also.)

Hiring I have a head count. Maybe two. you can argue the value of IA/IxD whatever all day long, I got a headcount. I want someone who can do it all. I get someone great at one, adequate at the other two. I call that winning.

You know who loves the title UX designer? The hiring manager (who isn't a design manager.) Because a) I don't have to figure out what all the tradeoffs are and b) I can feel my one-two headcounts without freaking out my app will suck eggs.

Design is not very customer-centric when it comes to their clients.

I would love to have IxD and IxA as a matched set. Among folks whom I expect will understand me, I sometimes refer to "interaction architecture". But folks like me who were using the term "interaction design" early on were partly running away from a rhetorical collision with "software architecture" on the technical side, so we didn't go there. Having information design / information architecture / interaction design / interaction architecture would be tidy.

As you say, Christina, UXD has won out because it keeps hiring managers from having to understand these distinctions ... and also because it keeps sloppy designers from having to understand them, either.

I'd also argue, it keeps hiring managers from hiring the skillsets they need. It allows them to be lazy and overly simplistic in an area which is incredibly complicated, intricate, and NOT simple. The person the NY Times needs is not the same person that Facebook needs, is not the same person that Oracle needs, is not the same person that Samsung needs. Using the same titles to describe all 3 of these types of "UX Design" is absurd. (AND that is just the innie side of things).

UX Design is lazy speak, for lazy people, who will never get great product out of their team. Great product comes from clarity of the team roles.

I'm sorry Christina, but if I was interviewing with you in those hiring manager roles, I'd leave. I'd leave b/c it would be clear that you don't know what it is I do, nor would you have the ability to care, judge, or nurture my position. You suck as a hiring manager. (I don't mean YOU, I mean the person you were talking about.) Your description of a hiring manager is shameful, lazy, and will lead to shit design, with horrible IA.

IMHO, UX Designer hasn't won b/c there are few people w/ the title UX Designer who are doing anything worthy to be called good UX. Why do I know b/c there is 90% shit out there (Sturgeon's Law, so be it). It's shit b/c of this laziness.

If you want great design, get rid of UX. Kill it now! For your orgs sake.

So what do you tell the 10 person company who is going to hire their first design role? And has ONE headcount? and is going to run out of money six months earlier if they hire two? (and raising/getting profit is not guaranteed) A good, multidisciplinary person can mean the difference between survival and death.

That hiring manager might love having lots of experts, but she has 2 front end engineers, 4 back end engineers, 1 sysadmins a marketing/product/sales guy and an office manager/accountant. And she has finally been convinced she needs a designer (because Dave McClure said it mattered) and now you are going to tell her she needs an IxD, an IA and a graphic designer?

How do we onboard all those people just starting to get design?

Hint: not this startupsthisishowdesignworks.com (love the first part, but when it comes to different titles, it falls down.)

If you're only going to hire one person, that seems to me to militate in favor of having a good vocabulary for discussing their skills.

A hiring manager who cannot say something like, "I need someone who can handle some tough information architecture problems, is also capable of taking on some straightforward interaction design problems, and has enough visual design skills to support development by producing some simple image assets," then they won't be able to find the One Designer who is right for them.

Why would they say that? Why wouldn't they say "I need someone who can make sure people can find the product they are looking for, and buy them easily, and I want the product to feel beautiful so people enjoy shopping?" Admittedly you should have as much design vocabulary as they have engineer vocab... know front end from back, know why .net might be challenging. But are we making it easy for them to speak our language?

Our title wars are making it harder and more frustrating to know how to understand how it hire. Is it surprising that UX is the title de jour, and behance shows interfaces with the occasional wireframe?

B/c they don't need a UX Designer, they need a "software designer" or a "digital product designer". Call it what it is. "user-centeredness" is only one part of the value chain here.

But further, I never said that you can't have 1 person do many things. But the title UX Designer doesn't describe it either.

Startups, this is how design works. Like engineers or PM's, a designer has deep skills in one area, and less in another. Did you know that google's front page is so simple because neither Larry nor Sergy knew much HTML?

What is important to get right in your product? Do you need people to find things in a large dataset (like Amazon or ITunes)? Your designer must know IA. Do you need it to be easy for people to do complicated tasks (like in MS Word or Photoshop)? You need a designer who knows Interaction design. Do you need a polished, good looking site (think Anthropologie, not Amazon.) You need a good graphic/visual designer.

You can hire one person, but they will probably only be really good at one thing, so you must stack rank.

I won't argue about UX, because I don't care that much... as long as there is a term for generalist. I'm good with digital product designer or even just designer. But we can't ignore the title UX designer, ridiculous or not, is common.

Christina, I have a concern that you are being focused on 2 arenas that I am not, which may skew our perspectives slightly: 1) web/mobile; 2) startups. While the bulk of UX work today is in 1, it is not the only place by a lot, and definitely not limited to startups at all.

Something that makes creating a program in "interaction design" so difficult is that it has to work for everyone, which it invariably can't. This is why the most successful programs (IMHO) are the ones like ITP, RCA and CIID which could care less about Web/mobile, or any other (here & now) concerns and teach thinking, process and methods that transcend media and contexts. The graduates of these and similar programs seem to succeed in multiple contexts.

I consciously supported the view of small companies because I knew it was complementary to your experience. Something very exciting is happening in the startup world: design is being recognized. Little companies grow big, and it's a chance to shape the minds.

You are academic, I am (sometimes grimly) pragmatic. It makes things fun.

But even when I was at Yahoo, not all teams could have the four people considered a core team: IxD, UI, UER (research) and Web Dev. Yet they didn't hire generalists, nor was there a core shared resource. This meant a lack of design of too many products.

I believe in a world where the disciplines are taught, and we have generalists and specialists, and the model of design is shaped by the company's needs.

And w/ that last paragraph, we have complete agreement.
Yahoo is a great example of an org that never quite figured it out. Unclear if they ever will. I'd put Google in a similar boat, btw. Facebook is an interesting place from the outside, so far.