WHAT IS USER EXPERIENCE DESIGN?
The breakdown: What is User Experience?
As a business (or service, product, or really any experience but I’m going to say business from now on to keep it simple), your users are the people who interact with your company, like your customers and employees.
Think about all of the points of interactions your customer throughout their journey of being your customer like:
The moment they discover your business
Reading reviews and scooping out competitors
Making the decision to go for it
Finding and navigating to your storefront (digital and/or physical)
Shopping what you’re offering
Making the decision to purchase
Purchasing
Experiencing the offering
For your team, think about the ways employees within your business do things like:
Manage projects
Organize customers
Develop products
Fulfill orders
Communicate both internally and externally
Schedule and conduct meetings
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. All of these points of interaction culminate in the way your people experience your business, or your user experience. That customer’s feeling about the business and decision to come back/repurchase/tell their friends about it depends on how effective that experience was. Your teams experience reflects how efficiently they’re able to get the job done and how they’ll feel doing it.
What is User Experience Design?
Each of these points of interaction is an opportunity to communicate your value, this is where user experience design comes in.
User experience (UX) design is the process of evolving the end user’s experience by improving the usability, accessibility, ease, and enjoyment of the interaction between the user and the business. UX designers do this by understanding their needs, wants, feelings, and pain-points in order to design for the user and consequentially, design solutions that actually work. Putting people at the center, resulting in Human Centered Design.
It can be a bit of an elusive and broad field that is an umbrella for a lot of different aspects of design, encompassing different design perspectives & approaches. Safe to say it can be hard to pin down. That being said, it always centers empathy and generally consists of a lot of user research, information architecture (organization of information, think: trying to find what you’re looking for on Amazon vs Apple Music— Amazon is a nightmare while Apple Music is pretty easy), interaction design, and visual design. Generally, the goal of UX is to create experiences that are easy, intuitive, seamless and provide an enjoyable experience for the user.
TLDR:
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User: the people who interact with your company, service, or product (like your customers and employees, if you’re a business owner)
User Experience: The way that your users experience your business
User Experience Design: The process of enhancing the user experience by improving the usability, accessibility, ease, and enjoyment of the interaction between the user and the business. UX designers do this by designing for the user— understanding their needs, wants, feelings, and pain-points to design solutions that work.
Always using empathy and generally consisting of research, information architecture, interaction design, and visual design.
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User Experience Design (UX, UXD, UED) goes by many names and many acronyms. Some people call it Customer Experience Design (CX) and focus specifically on the purchaser.
More variations that are pretty much the same thing: UX Architect, UX Researcher, UX Strategist, UI Designer, UX/UI Designer, Interaction Designer, to name a few.
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