A Stew of Acronyms

Interaction design as a formal discipline has been around for less than two decades. It's a young field, still defining itself and figuring out its place among sister disciplines such as information architecture (IA), industrial design (ID), communication (or graphic) design (CD), user-experience (UX) design, user-interface engineering (UIE), human-computer interaction (HCI), usability engineering (UE), and human factors (HF). In addition, many of these other disciplines are also new and still discovering their boundaries. Figure 1.10 clarifies the relationships.

Figure 1.10. The overlapping disciplines of interaction design.

As you can see, most of the disciplines fall at least partially under the umbrella of user-experience design, the discipline of looking at all aspectsvisual design, interaction design, sound design, and so onof the user's encounter with a product or service and making sure they are in harmony.

Information architecture is concerned with the structure of content: how to best structure and label content so that users find the information they need. Yahoo, with its dozens of labeled and categorized content areas, offers an excellent illustration of information architecture. Communication design is about creating a visual language to communicate content. The fonts, colors, and layout of Web sites and printed materials like this book provide examples of communication design. Industrial design is about formshaping objects in a way that communicates their use while also making them functional. Physical objects like chairs, tables, and refrigerators illustrate industrial design. Human factors makes sure those objects conform to the limitations of the human body, both physically and psychologically. Human-computer interaction is closely related to interaction design, but its methods are more quantitative, and its focus (as its name implies) is strongly on how humans relate to computers, unlike interaction design, which is about how humans relate to each other. The operating system on your computer provides an example of HCI. User-interface engineering is a subset of interaction design and HCI; it focuses on the controls of a digital device (see Chapter 6). Your digital camera's display is an example of UIE. Usability engineering is about testing products to make sure they make sense to users.

It's easy to see why people are confused!

Although these disciplines are separate, as the figure illustrates, they still overlap a great deal. Most successful products, especially digital products, involve multiple disciplines working in harmony. What is a laptop computer except a blend of the fruits of all these disciplines? Separating them is nearly impossible.

Not every organization needs a specialist working in each discipline; within an organization, one person, who might be called anything from an information architect to a user-interface engineer, canand probably willwork in several, shifting back and forth as needs require. It's the discipline that is important, not the title. The "imagineer" at Disney might do a job similar to that of the "user-interface architect" at a startup company.

Case Study: Corel PowerTRACE

The Company

Corel Corporation, a producer of graphics and office productivity software.

The Problem

CorelDRAW Graphics Suite is popular with sign makers, engravers, printers, and publishers, who often start their work with a low-quality bitmap image (such as from print or the Web) that needs to be converted to high-quality vector format. Once an image has been converted to vector format, it can be resized to any size necessary without any loss of resolution, so making signs or brochures from business card logos or Web logos is much easier. Corel had an applicationCorel Traceto convert bitmap images to vector graphics, but users had many problems with it. For one thing, it was not well integrated with the rest of the graphics suite, and the controls it offered weren't enough to meet users' needs. Some users were even having to redraw bitmap images by handa tedious process that could waste hours of time.

The Process

A design prototype from the Corel team shows the work in progress.

courtesy of Corel

The design team at Corel interviewed users and watched how they worked to better understand this tracing part of the user workflow. The Corel software design team then reevaluated the usefulness of Corel Trace as a stand-alone tracing utility and concluded that users would be better served by a different solution: one that was built into the main design software, CorelDRAW.

The Solution

PowerTRACE saves users significant time and effort by providing the tracing control needed for a seamless workflow.

courtesy of Corel

Through iterative design and prototyping, the design team created Corel PowerTRACE, which enables users to preview a trace as a translucent overlay directly on top of the original image, so that users can easily compare before-and-after results. Users no longer have to redraw bitmaps by hand. Corel PowerTRACE allows them much greater control over the tracing, including control over the number of curves and types of colors that appear in the new vector graphic. PowerTRACE also better reflects users' workflow, since it's integrated into CorelDRAW instead of being a stand-alone utility.