Design is a broad term.

Some claim that everyone designs, and depending on exactly how you define design, that may be true. Not surprisingly though, many professional designers react uncomfortably to this. It helps me to distinguish between being creative and designing. Creativity is a free-form process that anyone can participate in. We are all creative in some way or another. But professional design is a discipline where experience, talent, techniques, tools, and skills are applied to synthesize and articulate fuzzy creative ideas into something usable.

There are many facets to that “something usable” though: the interior, the exterior, how it looks, how it performs its function, and so on. With regard to software there is database design, object-oriented design, web service design, interface design, navigation design, and visual design, just to name a few.

Why differentiate? Why distinguish between database design and visual design? It’s all design right? Because the talents, techniques, and tools required vary drastically among them. And we have people who refer to themselves as “designers” mixing with software engineers or programmers resulting in confusion about who is responsible for and designing what.

To help this issue, we can group the various design disciplines without over generalizing too much. “Front-end” and “back-end” are common terms used to separate the interface from underlying code – the code that makes everything work. It’s not bad I suppose and it has the advantage of already being used and understood (to some degree). But more appropriate terms would be “interactive design” and “functional design”.

Interactive design encompasses visual design, interaction design, user research, information architecture, information design (not database – the user representation and visualization), and usability. Interactive design is about the user experience, what the user sees and interacts with: form and behavior. Alternatively, functional design is about the underlying architecture and foundation to support and deliver the user experience.

Historically, we’ve done a good job on functional design. That’s what software development has been all about. I can’t count the times in the past I’ve heard “just slap a GUI on it and we’re ready to ship!” (You would never hear that in automotive design, would you?). As users’ expectations have increased thanks to experience with well designed software (they didn’t know what they were missing) and the natural evolution and maturing of software development, interactive designers are slowly being recognized as critical to world-class software development.

So, by software design we mean interactive design and functional design; equally important, but drastically different.