[barmstrong]

USER INTERFACE DESIGN

Most cs students graduate without experience making products that normal (non cs) people can use. That's a shame, especially when you consider that some killer products (iPod, Basecamp) have largely been successful due to user interfaces.

[warfangle]

UI Design has more to do with Industrial Design and less with Computer Science.

In other words: UI Design is to Computer Science what Industrial Design is to Physics. In that respect, they should bring more programming to the "art" programs (especially digital art), and less art to the computer science programs:

You don't really need to know the nitty gritty of hash tables, the difference between bubble sort and quicksort, how to implement Djikstra's Algorithm or how to build a blazing fast trie to build a beautiful+easy+informative interface to complicated software.

(You may, however, at some point, need to hand off your completed work to someone who does - depending on the platform)