When people ask me what my major is and I tell them Digital Arts & Communications, they tend to stare at me blankly because they don't really know what that means since it's such a new field.

In short, it's one part art, one part design, and one part psychology. It's similar to a degree in Computer Arts & New Media or Graphic Design, but where they gain an overall knowledge of graphic, print, web and motion graphic design, we become specialists in designing things for usability, web information architecture, and interactive products (like the look and feel of your operating system and the interfaces for you favorite programs).

If we make a very pretty design that is unintuitive, we have failed miserably. If we make an ugly design that is simple to use, that's not good enough either. If we make something that looks nice and is easy but had to have a lot of functionality removed to achieve that simplicity, then we cheated. Our designs have to be at least as artistically interesting and sophisticated as anything else out there made by people studying any other major, but our creative decisions must also be supported by things like extensive demographic research, heuristic analyses, and so on.

In other words, it's up to us to figure out how to make things super simple to use and super sexy without making any compromises whatsoever in features, performance, accessibility, etc.