I must say I have no love for the "discipline" of interaction design. In my myopic view interaction design is like plumbing. You only notice it when it's broken. Even when it's exemplary, I can hardly imagine gushing over it. I've yet to say during my 54 years "Wow, that was one amazing toilet flush."
One thing I know about information architecture I learned over 40 years ago. I think I might be the last inhabitant on this planet who knows it. But I still believe it, though I seldom any longer see it applied.
My father made me take speed reading courses when I was younger. It's something I've found so valuable--and I knew even as a pre-teen how valuable it would be--that I never for a moment regretted taking speed reading or having taken it.
I was good at speed reading, quickly reaching bursts of 3,000 words per minute and a sustained rate of 1,200 wpm. That's roughly six book-sized pages in a minute. With 75% recall.
During my first lesson, the teacher brought out "The Wall Street Journal." At the time the paper had eight columns across and very few visual interruptions. The teacher explained that newspapers were designed so that they could be read quickly. You could read down a column in a newspaper and your eyes didn't need to scan from left to right. You could read unimpeded right down the page, in other words.
Column width was created for a reason. There was purposeful interaction design behind it.
Today of course we set type based on aesthetics not functionality. We make things hard to read either because we inherently believe what we've written is unimportant or we don't know better or both.
I guess I don't mind, really, interaction design.
What I really don't like is blowhards who don't know what they're doing and shroud their ignorance in a lexicon that makes mysterious that which should be logical and simple.
