User Experience

User experience (UX) design is the process design teams use to create products that provide meaningful and relevant experiences to users. This involves the design of the entire process of acquiring and integrating the product, including aspects of branding, design, usability and function.

“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 – UX design covers a vast array of other areas, too. A UX designer is concerned with the entire process of acquiring and integrating a product, including aspects of branding, design, usability and function. It is a story that begins before the device is even in the user’s hands.

Since UX design encompasses the entire user journey, it’s a multidisciplinary field – UX designers come from a variety of backgrounds such as visual design, programming, psychology and interaction design. To design for human users also means you have to work with a heightened scope regarding accessibility and accommodating many potential users’ physical limitations, such as reading small text. A UX designer’s typical tasks vary, but often include user research, creating personas, designing wireframes and interactive prototypes as well as testing designs.