What education does an interface designer need?
Today, in most IT companies in our country, such an important and crucial stage as the design of interfaces is most often divided between a designer and a programmer. This is evidenced not so much by my own work experience, although he, of course, also, as sometimes viewed list of vacancies, where individual vacancies of interface designers appear very rarely, usually “interface design” is one of the requirements for these professions. Let's try to figure out how it is right.
In my line of business, I also had to deal with the design of the interface of a web page and the construction of a competent link between the pages. I am a developer myself and a person with a technical education, but who has learned 10 years in a humanitarian school and has a rather large baggage of humanitarian knowledge. So, I was faced with the problem that the knowledge that I possess is absolutely not enough to design a good interface.
I'm not saying that my knowledge was useless for this, but rather the opposite - it is clear that a competent and thoughtful interface required clear logic. For example, to handle all user actions, detect, and in some cases correct his mistakes. This is very much in common with the discipline "Information Theory", which we read in the fourth year. It can be seen that in many cases it is enough just to follow common sense and that most often you should not invent a bicycle, but to take as a basis decisions that users have already got used to.
But then the dark forest begins. Moreover, the dark forest begins for the designer. It is clear that designers often have a certain set of knowledge and color compatibility and people's attitude to beauty, which will allow visitors to your site (or program users) to treat the product a little better at best, or at least not let it leave the site due to the fact that the color scheme makes them disgusted. But nevertheless, it is a drop in the sea of ​​interface tasks, the dark forest nevertheless comes.
And this dark forest is called psychology. It is this science that assumes the lion's share of the tasks associated with the design of interfaces. In fact, this, of course, is not surprising, because it is clear that the interface is a kind of connecting link between a person and a computer, and it is clear that a person is a much more complex system, so the main burden falls on psychology. This science studies such undoubtedly important topics as the proper organization of screen space (micro ergonomics is concerned with this), understanding how a person perceives information, how much information needs to be given to a person on a page, how to make a person get used to the website or program more quickly (this deals with cognitive psychology - psychology of knowledge). In the end, this is in our opinion an intuitive thing, which, although it cannot yet be clearly formalized, nevertheless also has its own laws - to make it so interesting for the user. If we are talking about social networks, for example, then social psychology is involved. In my opinion, without understanding the basics of these disciplines, the design of interfaces is more like a fortune telling.
Of course, it’s hard to realize that after higher education, and how it seemed, it’s necessary to study something else, and study normally, and not carelessly, but it seems to be an integral part of today's world, where higher education is not always enough. And if we recall the great discoveries and inventions, then very many of them are made precisely at the junction of sciences, and the junction of sciences cannot be felt if you look at it only from one edge. So I decided for myself that in the near future I will take up the study of this, of course, difficult, but interesting science - psychology.
In my line of business, I also had to deal with the design of the interface of a web page and the construction of a competent link between the pages. I am a developer myself and a person with a technical education, but who has learned 10 years in a humanitarian school and has a rather large baggage of humanitarian knowledge. So, I was faced with the problem that the knowledge that I possess is absolutely not enough to design a good interface.
I'm not saying that my knowledge was useless for this, but rather the opposite - it is clear that a competent and thoughtful interface required clear logic. For example, to handle all user actions, detect, and in some cases correct his mistakes. This is very much in common with the discipline "Information Theory", which we read in the fourth year. It can be seen that in many cases it is enough just to follow common sense and that most often you should not invent a bicycle, but to take as a basis decisions that users have already got used to.
But then the dark forest begins. Moreover, the dark forest begins for the designer. It is clear that designers often have a certain set of knowledge and color compatibility and people's attitude to beauty, which will allow visitors to your site (or program users) to treat the product a little better at best, or at least not let it leave the site due to the fact that the color scheme makes them disgusted. But nevertheless, it is a drop in the sea of ​​interface tasks, the dark forest nevertheless comes.
And this dark forest is called psychology. It is this science that assumes the lion's share of the tasks associated with the design of interfaces. In fact, this, of course, is not surprising, because it is clear that the interface is a kind of connecting link between a person and a computer, and it is clear that a person is a much more complex system, so the main burden falls on psychology. This science studies such undoubtedly important topics as the proper organization of screen space (micro ergonomics is concerned with this), understanding how a person perceives information, how much information needs to be given to a person on a page, how to make a person get used to the website or program more quickly (this deals with cognitive psychology - psychology of knowledge). In the end, this is in our opinion an intuitive thing, which, although it cannot yet be clearly formalized, nevertheless also has its own laws - to make it so interesting for the user. If we are talking about social networks, for example, then social psychology is involved. In my opinion, without understanding the basics of these disciplines, the design of interfaces is more like a fortune telling.
Of course, it’s hard to realize that after higher education, and how it seemed, it’s necessary to study something else, and study normally, and not carelessly, but it seems to be an integral part of today's world, where higher education is not always enough. And if we recall the great discoveries and inventions, then very many of them are made precisely at the junction of sciences, and the junction of sciences cannot be felt if you look at it only from one edge. So I decided for myself that in the near future I will take up the study of this, of course, difficult, but interesting science - psychology.
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Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/91933/
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