Again, I'm just trying to argue against nomenclature that's confusing issues here: I feel you're improperly advertising yourself when you call yourself a designer these days if you really do know the science of interaction design and can use its tools. A great majority of people who are designers do more beautification than usability. You need a different noun if you're truly doing real usability stuff, including the studies, heatmaps etc, that make up the UI Usability world's process.
>/UI/UX/Interaction design is a new thing
I'm going to disagree with you about this. It was a specialization in many schools by the end of the 90s in computer science departments (Called Human Computer Interaction). I have two very dear friends with degrees in it who are 29 and 32. Here is one such program: http://www.gradadmiss.gatech.edu/programs/multidisciplinary/... Actual industrial design degrees (which are pretty applicable to software) have been around for decades.
There is a big difference between "People who make things pretty" and "People who make things interact well with people" and the training is different. Now if a person trained in one of those worked on self training the other, it still seems like calling themselves something acknowledging the dual nature of what they do: Something like UX Engineer and Graphic Designer would be more exact than the term "UX Designer" which in practice usually seems to mean "Artist who makes things pretty then loudly, without good reasons, without a willingness to understand costs or decades of human/computer interaction, requires a large amount of authority acceded to him without further explanation and requires we do a lot of things just so without talking about tradeoffs because he doesn't seem to really have a mental model to talk about what he does so can't really compromise well and retailor his solutions to the issue".
Those using the title often feels like people trained to do good art (even good commercial art) refusing to do a job and explain themselves when how they want their art animated doesn't actually make for good user interactions or would cost 3 arms and 3 legs more than the client has.
A lot of this is a function of how people without true backgrounds and training in design get into the field: the computing field is super tolerant of people not trained in this stuff but who get stuff done. Happens with programming too. But programming is a little less tolerant of handwavy BS than art is (at a point, its a "did it work" thing which is somewhat demonstrable for programming). Where "Did it work" for design isn't really as testable without a user study. (I'm not saying non-trained by a college to do this thing shouldn't be in the field, just that they're less filtered).
Now, all of this isn't to mean: Designers shouldn't know the flow of what they're doing the art for. But until a designer show me a track record of UI improvement and comes equipped with the tools to show you made something better, lay off the misguided airs of certainty. Those tools exist. I feel if you can't use them, and can't prove yourself you got to let your client know this is most art than science and they should also really listen to other voices in the process.
I will agree with you on the points of nomenclature. But most of everything else you said sounds anecdotal stemming from a possible bad personal experience you might have had.
Just because HCI has been studied for several decades now, it doesn't mean it has been WIDELY studied, understood and applied as a concept from the beginning. Just because you have a friend who studied it back in the late 90's it doesn't mean that it was a subject matter covered nation-wide by all universities by any stretch of the imagination and even less so as a concept widely considered by developers of the time when making their interfaces for their digital products. The examples of good interface design from this era are few. The only point I was trying to make was that it is expected to have a lot of designers from non-computer science backgrounds working in these fields at the moment because they are new fields. 20, 30, years is nothing when thinking about the lifetime of a profession. I'm older than the first Xerox GUI. It is arrogant to say that all or most of these designers only think in terms of "art". It only shows your possible(I dont really know you) lack of understanding of both design and art.
Lastly, you mentioned how the effectiveness of design is not quantifiable which leads me to believe you diminish the importance design for this reason. As you probably know but may have have forgotten, in HCI it is impossible to divorce the human aspect from the computer aspect of the theory. Humans are unpredictable, often preferring to go about doing things counter-intuitively or in surprising ways. These decisions are mostly influenced by social or genetic predispositions often which are unpredictable. There will never be 1 right answer or formula to anything regarding human interaction with anything. Yet, somehow through proper design, developer's and designers have increasingly been able manage this and adapt as things evolve quickly.
You completely missed my comment, saying the opposite of what I in fact said in several places. I work with lots of people, generally speaking, 5-15 short contracts a year doing drop in consulting on iPhone/Embedded Linux Devices, including products under failure/needing rescue.
While not to the point my number has a small error rate, I assure you people I am describing exist a number of places, completely unrelated to my short stay with them. They're pretty well disliked by the internal engineers at their job too, but management doesn't always listen as closely to the internal employees as to to me. Your psychoanalysis is wrong. I know good ones too! And I've had this conversation telling them why an engineer will think they're so damn good.
My issue is only with the fakers.
>It is arrogant to say that all or most of these designers only think in terms of "art".
I never said they only think in terms of art. Most seem (when trained) to be trained in either web design specifically, or graphic design, specifically print based graphical design.
Lots of them do think in terms of more than art. However these fakers are terrified of discourse about their work, unwilling to defend why it is better than lower cost alternatives, and often terrified/huge foes of quantification of their work. My issue is lots of them regurgitate cargo cult design from smashing magazine, etc, without ever measuring their work and objecting furiously when other start to put tools in place to do so.
>Lastly, you mentioned how the effectiveness of design is not quantifiable which leads me to believe you diminish the importance design for this reason
My issue is with those who refuse to accept the use of quantification of the design. It is very quantifiable. That is my only issue. I know how to do absurdly useful verification techniques to quantify a design. Many UI Designers get threatened no matter how carefully you tiptoe that into the project plan. The insistance that many of these folk require that you follow their ideas because humans are ineffable even though we can actually time how much better or worse their tiny button works is my frustration and pain until I have this conversation with the person who they've already sold their idea to. I'm talking abou the person who's trying to actively avoid developing their own understanding of a 44px button doing better than a 22px button from the statistics we deliver you on how many people miss with that small button you have there, as shown to you with a 100 person beta test trying to do a couple things.
I mean, these same people are the ones who bemoan trying two different packages in a direct mail print campaign. They wouldn't do better in print design either.
They should both know at least some of these better or at least on a comparable level to me, or at the very least, be eager for data showing them right or wrong, how well their job was performed.
I'm sure there are a few good guys out there with a non-college training regimen who don't come from a graphic design background in this stuff, because as you mentioned, it's a young field. But I'm tired of people claiming authority on crap and not backing it up. I'm tired of them resisting putting measurement in place when all we require is "we're seeing a lot of errors doing X, please look for a way that has a lower error rate".
This isn't an invective against all people who call themselves UI Designers. It pointing out that term is over broad and you're associating yourself with a bunch of fakes by calling yourself that. They're often unwilling to engage in productive discussion with the rest of the product team, and who often recoil from objective measurement of their work.
If it makes you feel better: Programmers who apply for jobs have a seeming 90-95% "can't program at all" rate in my experience. I mean, dirt simple stuff. UI Designers have a smaller fraud rate than them :D. And I'm pretty sure programmers have taken "being full of BS" to heretofore unseen levels. But enough about my field, lets talk more about yours :P
>/UI/UX/Interaction design is a new thing
I'm going to disagree with you about this. It was a specialization in many schools by the end of the 90s in computer science departments (Called Human Computer Interaction). I have two very dear friends with degrees in it who are 29 and 32. Here is one such program: http://www.gradadmiss.gatech.edu/programs/multidisciplinary/... Actual industrial design degrees (which are pretty applicable to software) have been around for decades.
There is a big difference between "People who make things pretty" and "People who make things interact well with people" and the training is different. Now if a person trained in one of those worked on self training the other, it still seems like calling themselves something acknowledging the dual nature of what they do: Something like UX Engineer and Graphic Designer would be more exact than the term "UX Designer" which in practice usually seems to mean "Artist who makes things pretty then loudly, without good reasons, without a willingness to understand costs or decades of human/computer interaction, requires a large amount of authority acceded to him without further explanation and requires we do a lot of things just so without talking about tradeoffs because he doesn't seem to really have a mental model to talk about what he does so can't really compromise well and retailor his solutions to the issue".
Those using the title often feels like people trained to do good art (even good commercial art) refusing to do a job and explain themselves when how they want their art animated doesn't actually make for good user interactions or would cost 3 arms and 3 legs more than the client has.
A lot of this is a function of how people without true backgrounds and training in design get into the field: the computing field is super tolerant of people not trained in this stuff but who get stuff done. Happens with programming too. But programming is a little less tolerant of handwavy BS than art is (at a point, its a "did it work" thing which is somewhat demonstrable for programming). Where "Did it work" for design isn't really as testable without a user study. (I'm not saying non-trained by a college to do this thing shouldn't be in the field, just that they're less filtered).
Now, all of this isn't to mean: Designers shouldn't know the flow of what they're doing the art for. But until a designer show me a track record of UI improvement and comes equipped with the tools to show you made something better, lay off the misguided airs of certainty. Those tools exist. I feel if you can't use them, and can't prove yourself you got to let your client know this is most art than science and they should also really listen to other voices in the process.