There are new job titles emerging in digital design every year. Or so it seems.  UX design deals with how a user feels about an application. UI design is the what, where and how elements work on the apps, Information Architecture is how an application is organized.

Interaction Design is the newest abbreviation. ID or IxD is how the user and application act and react to each other. Interaction design defines the relationship between people and the product they use, from computers to mobile apps and beyond.  In theory and definition, this seems to me to be the most important job.

One mistake some designers make is a tendency to focus on how things look, when the focus should equally be on how things work.

IxD is the practice of designing interactive digital products, environments, systems, and services. It is often associated with digital design, but it is also useful when creating a physical product and considering how a user might interact with it.

Some crossovers of interaction design include human–computer interaction, and software development.

It’s not that interaction designers don’t consider form, but they are also concerned  with analyzing how things are, how they could be, and satisfying the majority of users.

If you have never heard of IxD, don’t feel bad. The design fields are changing very fast right now. A future post might have to look at another job that I only discovered this month: chief experience officer (CXO). A CXO is an executive responsible for the overall user experience (UX) of an organization’s products and services.

Not everyone in the field likes this flourishing of new abbreviations. I saw an article “Why UX, UI, CX, IA, IxD, and Other Sorts of Design Are Dumb” which opines that we should “stop setting up definitions for overkill terminology and start doing the job.”

Still confused? Take a look at this short explanation of UX vs UI vs IA vs IxD.