As the tech profession continues to grow globally and remote design work becomes the standard, the question “What is UX design?” is an important one for 2023.
User experience design is a vast, multidisciplinary and fascinating field. It shapes the products and services we use on a daily basis and can make or break the success of a business or brand.
A career in UX design is fast-paced and challenging, requiring a highly diverse skillset. If you want to break into this field, there’s plenty to learn!
In this guide, we’ll provide the ultimate introduction to UX design and tell you everything you need to know about getting started in this exciting industry. We’ll start by going over what is a UX designer, then briefly go through its history. Next, we’ll look at some of the disciplines involved, as well as what a user experience designer does in their day.
Lastly, we’ll consider the immense value of UX design to the world, and outline how you can go about becoming a designer yourself.
WHAT IS USER EXPERIENCE DESIGN?
User experience (UX) design is the process design teams use to create products that provide meaningful and relevant experiences to users. UX design involves the design of the entire process of acquiring and integrating the product, including aspects of branding, design, usability and function. Designing an experience includes not only making the software easy to use but also designing the other experiences related to the product, for example, the marketing campaign, the packaging and after-sales support. Most importantly, UX design is concerned with delivering solutions that address pain points and needs. After all, no one will use a product that serves no purpose.
What UX Designers Do Goes Beyond UI Design
“User Experience Design” is often used interchangeably with terms such as “User Interface Design” and “Usability.” However, while usability and user interface (UI) design are important aspects of UX design, they are subsets of it.
A UX designer is concerned with the entire process of acquiring and integrating a product, including aspects of branding, design, usability and function. It’s a story that begins before the device is even in the user’s hands.
“No product is an island. A product is more than the product. It is a cohesive, integrated set of experiences. Think through all of the stages of a product or service – from initial intentions through final reflections, from the first usage to help, service, and maintenance. Make them all work together seamlessly.”
— Don Norman, inventor of the term “User Experience.”
Products that provide a great user experience (e.g., the iPhone) are thus designed with the product’s consumption or use in mind and the entire process of acquiring, owning and even troubleshooting it. Similarly, UX designers don’t just focus on creating usable products; they concentrate on other aspects of the user experience, such as pleasure, efficiency and fun. Consequently, there is no single definition of a good user experience. Instead, a good user experience meets a particular user’s needs in the specific context where they use the product.
UX Design—A Formal Definition
The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) defines user experience as:
“A person's perceptions and responses that result from the use or anticipated use of a product, system or service.”
— ISO 9241-210, Ergonomics of human-system interaction—Part 210: Human-centered design for interactive systems
We can break this definition into two parts:
A person’s perceptions and responses.
The use of a product, system or service.
In user experience, designers do not have much control over a person’s perceptions and responses—the first part of the definition. For example, they cannot control how someone feels, moves their fingers or controls their eyes as they use a product. However, designers can control how the product, system or service behaves and looks—the second part of the definition.
“One cannot design a user experience, only design for a user experience. In particular, one cannot design a sensual experience, but only create the design features that can evoke it.”
— Jeff Johnson, Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department of the University of San Francisco
The simplest way to think about user experience design is as a verb and a noun. A UX designer designs (verb)—ideates, plans, changes—the things that affect the user experience (noun)—perceptions and responses to a system or service.
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