I’d like to preface this post by saying that I believe there is enough pretension in the design world, and I’m not trying to add to it. This is a frivolous exploration into the classification of design disciplines.
That said, focusing on my design responsibilities, and ignoring the fact that application development is also a large part of what I do, I have struggled to describe what it is I do for quite some time. This is a particularly troublesome task when speaking to those who are not familiar with industry terminology. On a fairly regular basis, I see people who have similar responsibilities using a mishmash of acronyms as a title — UX, IA, IxD. The terms these acronyms represent are all completely valid, and represent distinct skill sets. I have nothing against these terms, and yet, aside from being a mouthful, they do little to help people (who are not in our industry) understand what we do. On the other side of the equation, we have people who are commonly referred to as graphic designers.
I propose that there are really only two types of design when it comes to software/web application development — Analytical & Emotional. Now, I realize the term “Analytical Design” would present itself as an oxymoron to some, but let’s come back to that in a moment. In design, how something functions, and how something makes you feel can be considered separate, but very tightly coupled aspects.
When we observe something on a superficial level, something about what we see (be it colour, imagery, or something much less obvious) sets off fireworks in the limbic system of our brain and we’re compelled to feel something. This is a subconscious reaction — we don’t decide that the colour red will make us feel passionate, it just does. This uncontrollable reaction is what makes design so powerful, and at the same time, so unpredictable. I consider these elements to be Emotional Design, or you may know them simply as art.
How an application works, how it’s organized, and how you interact with it will also elicit emotion, but in a much more obvious, and explicit way. As we’re using something, we expect it to work in a particular way. If it doesn’t function in the way we expect it to, we decide that it is wrong at some level, and this frustrates us. Unlike Emotional Design, when the inverse is true, and something works exactly as we’d expect it to, we usually have no reaction. Of course it works that way! Why would it work any other way? For this reason, most people cannot explain why an application works well — they just know that it didn’t frustrate them. This is because someone took the time to stop and think about all the ways that an element could be used then logically calculated how it should be designed so that works intuitively. This is Analytical Design.
There is no question that there is spillover between the two disciplines. This concept is perhaps best thought of as a spectrum with Analytical Design at one end and Emotional Design on the other. Will these terms help people better understand design disciplines? Perhaps not, but I believe their meanings are more intuitively obvious and distinct than what we’ve been using.
