I would say the field is even broader than just those two areas. Much design literature is on a third focus, the interaction between desiderata and materials, which has a significant overlap with engineering. This is perhaps most obvious in architecture (the kind involving buildings, but also software architecture / API design), which is as its core not primarily UX or visual design, though it has elements of both. Herb Simon's The Sciences of the Artificial is my favorite book in this area, though Donald Schön's The Reflective Practitioner is also a good book on design in this broader sense of producing human-usable artifacts out of materials.

Spot on.

Also: both skillsets (UX and visual design) are empirically testable for usability.

That's the one-note-flute Jakob Nielsen's been composing orchestras with successfully for over 17 years on his Use-IT site: http://www.useit.com/

As has been noted: Nielsen never created a beautiful thing in his life, but damned if they haven't been usable.

In fact, I'd go so far as to say that the vast majority of design people are horrible at UX. Not that programmers are any better, but in general, industry standards of UX is incredibly poor.

I agree, and with my apologies for the impending slashes, you can also go a little broader with the statement: There is design as visuals/aesthetics and there is design as problem solving/arrangement of a system. Integration of these two spheres is the key to great design.

In the field of web/app/interaction development, just as you say this largely comes down to the two disciplines you identified: Visual Design and User Experience.

In other fields, such as architecture or industrial design, the problem solving/systemic arrangement side includes additional concerns such as structural integrity, physical usefulness, manufacturability, maintainability, etc.

(And further, architecture places weight on the expression of values, which isn't as much of a concern in screen/interaction or industrial design.)

I think that with a bit of innate talent, both sides of this duality can be mastered and personal improvements made. It really comes down to practice, which in the end tends to be proportional to enjoyment and passion.

Lastly, it's the latter half of this duality that is somewhat similar to coding, or more accurately "pseudo-coding". It's not necessarily an effortless transition however: I can design logical systems and arrangements ADED, but attempting to translate that aptitude into coding skills is slow and painful.

Just wanted to add that those two fields neccesarily overlap.

Can you elaborate about this fields? What kind of problems belong to VD and what to UX (possibly with examples of good and bad desing/ux)? I'm a coder (cs student) genuinely interested in learning some design skills, but I'm not quite sure what areas exactly to pursue.

I don't like to separate visual from UX. UX is top level, while user research, visuals, information architecture, for example, are branches. You cannot design UX, only design for it.

If I'm working on user research I need to understand the people (user groups) who use the product and how they use it. If I'm working on interaction design, I need to understand how each interaction takes place, what problem it's solving, what that means for the user, and how it effects anything else. If I'm working on visuals/graphics, I need to design the product/features/interactions in an aesthetically pleasing way that still targets the user groups.

UX is about how people interact with a product. Visual design is about what they see while interacting.

So UX will guide you towards what features are important and ways of exposing those features so the end user has the best experience. UX also tends to focus on testing assumptions.

Visual design will guide you towards making sure the elements on the page are aestheticly pleasing and that they communicate what is trying to communicated. Google is famous for testing it's shade of blue, but, IMO, great design can't be tested, but rather comes from a designer understanding her audience and the story she is trying to tell.

I think "great design can't be tested" is wrong. All design has consequence. If I make an add to cart button on an ecommerce site purple, I can test that to see if it performs better than the red add to cart button. Yes, these decisions (of choosing red or purple) can come from a designer understanding his/her audience, but should never be just taken at the designer's word... it should always be tested to make sure the designed solution is the right one.

I disagree: the really important changes take vision and guts, and can only be tested after the fact. Testing things like the color of a call-to-action button can certainly direct you to a local optima, but in a larger sense it misses the point. You can A/B test a whole bunch of small changes, but the really impactful ones take a unified vision that changes the whole design strategy of a website or product. Google didn't go from old Gmail to new Gmail by incrementally changing things based on testing, they took a good hard look at the pain points of the old site and applied a new visual direction to the site. The iPhone didn't come around by tweaking a phone piece by piece until people liked it better. It came around because someone had a vision and saw it through.

Don't get me wrong, usability testing is incredibly important. Every programmer can tell you how much they learned the first time they watched an uncoached newbie try out their software. And even with those paradigm-shifting design changes, you can and should test that the results are really an improvement. But you can't make big important changes by measuring the impact of every little detail.

Thank you for putting my thoughts into much better words. The "local maxima" point really nails it.

I would suggest focusing on visual design even if you are only interested in UX. Aside from technique, the core competency for both kinds of design is learning how to see. IMO, this is an easier skill to develop in the context of visual design. I would also recommend studying drawing, photography, motion graphics or interior design to improve your UX skills.

If your school offers it take a course in human computer interaction this will teach the fundamentals of UX such as designing menus to be intuitive and efficient.

Visit http://dribbble.com

That is the sort of skill it takes to be a great designer IMHO.