And that means more than creating a well-designed screen. It means developing a sound navigational structure. It means giving users the freedom to interact with the software while controlling their path enough to achieve your own goals. Hey, wait a minute. The truth is, when we move from print to electronic media, our jobs become a lot harder.
Interface design is interdisciplinary and inTRAdisciplinary.
What I mean is that it not only requires people of several disciplines to come together in harmony to create something, but they each need an understanding of the others' roles, capabilities and limitations. As a designer, you really do have to understand some programming, enough to be able to do some of it when pressed, in order to create an effective design. When I worked in a hotel they called it cross-training. Many designers would like to keep the process pure. They would like to apply the rules and conventions of good graphic design to the screen and let someone else worry about implementation and integration.