Soo many acronyms and deliverables: IA, IxD, UX, PX, XD, UCD…. April 24, 2008

In an ongoing series of articles on the early phases of RIA or Game project development one is likely to come across this menagerie of terms and titles:

• IA - information architecture, the organization of all the data in an application into logical bundles, and a clear navigation between. The careful choosing of the right ui components to match the underlying dimensionality of the data (e.g. a grid for multicolumnar) and single/multiple selection.
• IxD -interaction design, the consideration of the bi-directional communication of a user, armed with a mouse joystick and keyboard 'talking' with your application to collaboratively achieve a desired goal.
• UCD - User Centric Design, focusing on a particular end user capabilities and needs first, rather than technical merit, or business concerns first. It should focus on current or designed target audience, and often leads to workflows optimized to those User profiles, e.g a 7 year old editing a photo, has different requirements than an adult.
• UX - user eXperience, the summation of good copy, good graphic design, good motion design and smooth workflow, minimizing boredom, confusion.
• PX - player eXperience, the special considerations of user experience in games., or what makes games fun, typically involving [1] and progressive dynamic difficulty adjustment [2]
• XD - eXperience designer, can mean various things, typically someone skilled in blending a workflow (the minimal path to achieving a particular goal) with a narrative/plot to make it emotionally compelling and engaging. Often this is some blend of AfterFX, and Flash, and can involve actors and writers to script the experience.

Here's a paraphrase of how the IxD list views the blurry overlaps:
Information and Content are the nouns,
IA is the grammar,
IxD are the verbs,
Graphic Design are the adjectives,
Your app is the poem
Experience Architects are the poets....