What is User Experience (UX) and why it matters
Everyone is in the business of UX whether they like it or not
User Experience (UX) is a broad domain concerned with human interaction. Its practice encompasses many disciplines that employ various methodologies to understand user goals to build products and services.
This article gives a quick overview of some of the methods and roles within the domain of user experience and provides helpful articles to further your understanding.
Methods
There are many user experience methodologies to employ to understand behavior, derive insights, and build user interfaces.
Common methods include:
User Interviews
User interviews are a core component of any user researcher’s toolset. The researcher asks a participant open-ended questions to understand their goals and perceptions. The researcher then documents key learnings to inform development.
For more on user interviews:
Persona creation
A persona is a fictional character that embodies the goals and attitudes of a primary user of a product or service. It’s created from key learnings gained from other qualitative research methods. Designers use personas to provide focus to the product development process.
For more on personas:
and…
Card sorting
A card sorting activity asks users to group items and topics into logical categories. This activity helps to understand how a user thinks about information and tasks.
For more on card sorting:
Usability testing
In a usability test, a researcher gives a participant scenarios to perform specific tasks. The designer observes how they transverse a product or service. For example, a researcher asks the participant to make a payment in a digital app and observe their action.
For more on usability testing:
A/B testing
A/B testing entails serving different versions of a design to groups of users and quantitatively measuring results. For example, a designer creates a signup page with a blue button and another with a green button that is randomly served to hundreds of users to determine which variation yields the most signups.
For more on A/B testing:
Disciplines
Some of the disciplines within UX include user research (UxR), interaction design (IxD), and visual design (VD).
User research
User research focuses on the study of user behavior through direct observation and quantitative methods. A user researcher compiles insights from their analysis to inform design decisions.
For more on user research:
Interaction design
Interaction design distills user insights and goals to create designs. Interaction designers produce mockups, wireframes, and interfaces that help users experience a product or service.
For more on interaction design:
Visual design
Visual design focuses on how visual elements and interactions affect a user’s experience. A visual designer creates aesthetically appealing user interface systems and deploys it to enhance the usability of a product or service.
For more on visual design:
Disciplines within a company
The lines of these disciplines often blur into one, especially at smaller companies. Terms like product designer or UX/UI design often incorporate aspects of all three disciplines in one.
When I started at Flexport, I was the first designer and one of the first employees. I was tasked with each discipline as the company iterated to find product-market-fit. Once obtained, I grew the design team to have specific roles for each discipline.
I had the opposite experience when I worked at Google and Intuit. These companies have sophisticated design organizations with each discipline clearly defined. I was focused primarily on interaction design and had the honor of collaborating with many other talented designers.
The success or failure of design relies on close collaboration amongst each discipline as well as roles external to design. Regardless if you have “design” in your title, you can incorporate user research practices into your role.
Why user experience matters
Any company or organization with customers or users of some form or another is in the business of user experience, whether they like it or not.
The success or failure of a product or service relies on whether it meets the needs, wants, goals, and behaviors of people. The most successful companies in the world understand this dynamic and build their offerings accordingly.
Companies that don’t understand the role of user experience will either fail or get temporarily lucky until an offering with a better UX comes along.
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