Interaction Design vs. Usability Engineering
Well, what's the difference?
In a nutshell, Usability is about making the content of your web page/app/whatever easy for the user to access and take in. Interaction design is simply about taking care in the way the user will use your web page/app/whatever.
Personally I believe the differences are over-hyped and the time has come for people to take the strengths of both disciplines into the same philosophy. To explain what I mean here is a summary of what each term means:
Usability Engineering (UE) is a scientifically based school of engineering related to ergonomics; one of its basic premises is that you have information to relay to the user (be it instructions, news, updates on progress of the last action, etc). The user must be able to take this info in and then perform the next action necessary to their task. This must all be done efficiently, easily and without frustration.
Interaction Design (ID) is a loose term that people both with and without related qualifications use to describe what they do. It is the process of working out what a user will need to see and know at any stage while they are interacting with the application (or website, etc), then making sure they can do it in the way most appropriate.
The difference is that UE assumes that you want people to get hold of the information quickly, easily and without frustration, while ID takes account of 'soft' factors (like 'feel') that are often equally important to brand managers.
The strengths of UE are its origins; having a scientific basis and a documented history mean that Usability Engineers come armed to the teeth with data: what the human eye is capable of perceiving, what limits the average human working memory has, etc. In conjunction with this there are established aims, factors and metrics; you can get hard numbers out of a website to show exactly how it rates on any one of several scales. Usability professionals like to proceed by testing designs at each step; their data then informs their recommendations on how to proceed.
ID on the other hand is much more wooly; it totally encompasses UE in that Usability Engineering is a form of Interaction Design. In practice this is rarely seen to be the case and Interaction Designers will often proceed in designing a system based on personal experience, their feeling for the problem at hand and the brief they have in front of them. This generally leads to sites and applications that do not cater to as wide an audience, but gives a more comprehensive message to those that it reaches, often by using sound, animation and striking design.
As is probably clear if you've got this far, I don't subscribe to either methodology - or rather I subscribe to both. I think good, clear websites and systems are very important; they increasingly take up more of everyone's time and when people are frustrated by software the world is a worse place around them. However, the design-less, bland, text-based systems that so often come out of Usability Consultancies' studios cause me as much pain and anguish to use as ones with hard-to-read text.
I vote for clear, easy to navigate software, with obvious instructions and clear status information, all presented in a thoughtful, appropriately styled, interesting layout. Unless I am in a brochureware site or similar, where I am enjoying the feel of being taken on a journey and not knowing where I am or where I'm going.
I call myself an Interaction designer because I believe in usability and design - and I wish everyone else did. I vote for everything in moderation.
In a nutshell, Usability is about making the content of your web page/app/whatever easy for the user to access and take in. Interaction design is simply about taking care in the way the user will use your web page/app/whatever.
Personally I believe the differences are over-hyped and the time has come for people to take the strengths of both disciplines into the same philosophy. To explain what I mean here is a summary of what each term means:
Usability Engineering (UE) is a scientifically based school of engineering related to ergonomics; one of its basic premises is that you have information to relay to the user (be it instructions, news, updates on progress of the last action, etc). The user must be able to take this info in and then perform the next action necessary to their task. This must all be done efficiently, easily and without frustration.
Interaction Design (ID) is a loose term that people both with and without related qualifications use to describe what they do. It is the process of working out what a user will need to see and know at any stage while they are interacting with the application (or website, etc), then making sure they can do it in the way most appropriate.
The difference is that UE assumes that you want people to get hold of the information quickly, easily and without frustration, while ID takes account of 'soft' factors (like 'feel') that are often equally important to brand managers.
The strengths of UE are its origins; having a scientific basis and a documented history mean that Usability Engineers come armed to the teeth with data: what the human eye is capable of perceiving, what limits the average human working memory has, etc. In conjunction with this there are established aims, factors and metrics; you can get hard numbers out of a website to show exactly how it rates on any one of several scales. Usability professionals like to proceed by testing designs at each step; their data then informs their recommendations on how to proceed.
ID on the other hand is much more wooly; it totally encompasses UE in that Usability Engineering is a form of Interaction Design. In practice this is rarely seen to be the case and Interaction Designers will often proceed in designing a system based on personal experience, their feeling for the problem at hand and the brief they have in front of them. This generally leads to sites and applications that do not cater to as wide an audience, but gives a more comprehensive message to those that it reaches, often by using sound, animation and striking design.
As is probably clear if you've got this far, I don't subscribe to either methodology - or rather I subscribe to both. I think good, clear websites and systems are very important; they increasingly take up more of everyone's time and when people are frustrated by software the world is a worse place around them. However, the design-less, bland, text-based systems that so often come out of Usability Consultancies' studios cause me as much pain and anguish to use as ones with hard-to-read text.
I vote for clear, easy to navigate software, with obvious instructions and clear status information, all presented in a thoughtful, appropriately styled, interesting layout. Unless I am in a brochureware site or similar, where I am enjoying the feel of being taken on a journey and not knowing where I am or where I'm going.
I call myself an Interaction designer because I believe in usability and design - and I wish everyone else did. I vote for everything in moderation.
Labels: definition, interaction, interaction design, usability
