from the introduction of "Making the Web Work"

"User interface versus user experience: The sudden and dramatic influx of graphic designers into the interactive design area has been accompanied by a host of new terms and job titles. One of the most popular is "user experience." As I understand it, user experience encompasses every aspect of a person's interaction with an organization-- everything from the company Web site, to customer support, to shipping labels, to how the receptionist answers the phone. In other words, everything.

Unfortunately, user experience has become entangled, confused, and synonymous with the more specific term "user interface" a term that has been used in the software industry for decades. Despite its techno-babble overtone, user interface is the correct term for describing the specific layer of an interactive product where the technology and the user come together. Makign the Web Work is about user interface, not user experience."

I find this passage interesting for a number of reasons, not the least being that often in the valley interaction designers are responsible and expected to be good at interface design. And interface designers good at interaction. And graphic designers are sometimes relegated to colorists, if they are engaged at all.

I personally do not like the term "user interface", as it seems to me that it relegates the design to surface considerations... but I'd love to hear from others on this.

When I sat down to write my book, I asked myself the question "What are the key things an information architect should know to be effective?" In the book, I realized that interaction design was a tool IA"s needed, and touched lightly on it, with a strong bias to personas as the way to do it.

Now I'm working with my fellow managers at Yahoo to ask the same question. My team of interaction designers is pretty general as a rule, and they all know quite a bit of different stuff from each other. Their deliverables all look different and their processes are a grab bag. So I'm working my way through to figure out what people are doing, what's working, what isn't working and what should be used to make better products. Big fun!

So one of the things I'm working on in particular as part of this process is collecting methods and approaches that are useful in the practice of interaction design. These might include Information Architecture techniques, but I would assume they also have a few tricks of their own.

So starting from Bob's definition of Interaction Design, what are the things an ID needs to know? Please leave me your two cents, I'll add mine as I keep digging, and perhaps we'll have a little list before long.

Here's a quick start:

requirements gathering
needs analysis
conceptual modeling
personas, scenarios
task analysis
user flow/use case design

...