After all this, I realized that MS made a really powerful tool for really expert users. It seems that after all is said and done that it is a tool not for interaction designers, but for interactive designers and thus its real promise is lost because interactive designers don’t design or engineer applications but rather sites, and experiences. Interaction designers do both, and quite honestly are more skilled and experienced in designing complex interactivity than those who come to all this from interactive design. I know I’m going to get burned from that statement, but while interactive designers are really great and knowledgeable, they don’t know a heck of a lot about UX, cog psy, HCI, usability, etc. It just isn’t part of what they do. They concentrate mostly on implementing the presentation layer without much attention to the context of use, without using user centered research models, etc.
First of all, I didn’t know there was a major difference between Interaction Designer and Interactive Designer, although I guess it makes sense that you would want to distinguish between the two different disciplines. I usually hear User Experience vs developer, or something like that.
That aside, it is a very interesting take. It actually makes blend a bit more appealing to me, because I’m more a programmer than designer, but the interface seems pretty screwy relative even to Flex, so I don’t know…
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