UX Design Simply Defined

What is User Experience Design?
If you’re unclear about what User Experience Design is or what it means, I want to start by putting you at ease, because even the people in the UX Design industry don’t always agree on what User Experience means or how to define the roles of the people that create them. The goal of this article is to help you understand UX Design at its core and how the pieces fit together to create a successful User Experience.

There are various definitions for the terms User Experience and User Experience Design. I think part of the confusion and, in some cases, disagreement on the terms started with Don Norman’s invention of the term User Experience in the 1990’s. "User experience" encompasses all aspects of the end-user's interaction with the company, its services, and its products.” He didn’t say that User Experience is the digital part of an end-user’s interaction, he said it’s the overall interaction a person has with the company and its products. But now everyone, including Don Norman, has adopted User Experience as the interaction a person has using a digital product or website. This sounds simple enough, so why all the confusion?

I think the confusion is because people still have a hard time limiting UX to simply an end-users digital interactions. The term Customer Experience is currently the common term used to define the broad interaction an end-user has with the company, its services, and its products. Adopting Customer Experience as the broad term will hopefully help people narrow the use of the term User Experience (UX) to the digital interaction, making communication easier for everyone. That said, UX Design is the creation of a UX, an essential and critical aspect of the Customer Experience.

UX Design in Practice
The software industry is evolving at a mind-blowing pace and there isn’t one tried and true way to create the UX for all digital products. Each company and product has their own unique needs and requirements, including, but not limited to, the product complexity, technology, company culture, team roles, time to market, budget, and, of course, the needs of the end-users. UX Designers tend to have strong opinions on how to create a UX Design, which also contributes to the noise and confusion in our industry.

There are standard design principles that can be applied to creating a UX Design and there are traditional roles for the UX Design industry, but there aren’t any one size fits all answers for every UX Design project. I do believe that all UX Design can be defined using a common foundation for all the key components, standard roles, and the basic design principles and processes. None of the descriptions below are meant to be set in stone, but to establish a common foundation for our industry.

UX Design Processes
The original method of creating a UX Design is a “waterfall” process. Waterfall design is a step by step process that starts with a very wide approach to the design challenge and with every step the design solution gains more detail and definition, resulting in a completed design that is handed to an engineering team, complete with specifications and graphic assets that allow them to develop the final product. Agile and Lean are relatively new and currently popular development processes that incorporate rapid short design/development cycles achieved by a collaborative team of engineers, designers, and product managers. Many UX Designers are successfully integrating their design techniques to work with Agile and Lean development processes, but most are taking the best pieces from the waterfall, agile, and lean processes and applying them as needed to meet their product goals. There isn’t a single right or wrong way to incorporate UX Design into a project, because every project is unique. Typically larger projects with large teams of engineers in multiple locations use a process closer to Waterfall, and smaller projects with smaller co-located engineering teams use Agile/Lean processes. How the UX Design team and engineering teams work together will have many variables, but the most important thing is that they have strong communication and collaboration throughout the project.

UX Design Components
There are three key UX Design components: User Interface Design, Visual Interface Design, and Engineering. Every UX is composed of these three components. The roles involved in creating them may vary, but each one is absolutely necessary. One person can create all of the components, or each of these components can be accomplished by one or more people, each with specific and/or overlapping skills. My descriptions below are very high level and do not include the intricacies of working on a real software product, which can include multiple roles for each component. But, at its core, these are the three key UX components.

User Interface Design: This is the framework for a UX, the logic, behaviors, paradigm, interaction models, content, context, hierarchy of information, and ultimately the screen wireframes for the UX. You can think of a User Interface Designer as an architect. The final artifact from the work of an architect are blueprints. Take for example an architect who is designing a medical building used by doctors, patients, administration, laboratories, and even building managers. Each of these roles will need unique rooms, but they will also share common areas. A doctor will need an examination room with space for an examination table, a cabinet with a sink, outlets and space for special examination equipment, and lighting specific for examining a patient. Administrators may share a large room, each with a desk, a chair, two chairs for a patient and their guest, and outlets by each desk for lighting and other equipment. Then there are common areas like halls, restrooms, cafeteria, lobby, etc… Each of these rooms and areas need to be useful for their intended occupants and the building needs to be designed to work as a whole with common areas able to be used by everyone. The architect needs to learn about each of the roles and how they will use the building, the context in which they will use it, how it will be constructed, who will be constructing it, and then create the building design and the blueprints to ensure it’s built accurately. The more complex the building, the more work that goes into the design and the more complex the blueprints are to build it. The User Interface Designer is the architect and instead of designing a medical building they design a medical application creating wireframes instead of blueprints.

Visual Interface Design: Notice I said Visual “Interface” Design and not graphic design. This is because a successful Visual Interface Design for a UX will enhance the usability of the product as well as establish and reinforce its visual brand identity. Using the architecture analogy, the Visual Interface Design is equivalent to the interior design of a building. It includes the overall design style, lighting, choice and placement of furniture, choice of materials for carpets and flooring, and signage. Each of these will be decided for every room individually and for the building as a whole. An examining room may require a solid floor, neutral colors, and directed lighting to allow the focus to be on the patient being examined. The lobby may have a solid floor by the entry door to address dirt from the street, and industrial carpet in the bulk of the room to help control noise. The color of the lobby may be slightly neutral to help people feel like it’s a professional environment (confident), with bright accent colors for a little bit of happy energy (comfortable). These decisions are based on requirements for the users needs for the space, but they also take into consideration the users emotional needs. The Visual Design decisions increase the building usability and reinforce quality of the professionals using the building. The artifacts from the Interior Design are specifications to design every room in the building, including color and material swatches, and orders for the specific and appropriate light fixtures, furniture and window coverings. A Visual Interface Designer is the Interior Designer, and their artifacts are design specifications for each wireframe, including colors and icons, as well as recommendations for animation and control toolkits.

Engineering: This role is responsible for developing the final UX Design. The engineer must be included in all key and critical design decisions throughout the project. Ideally the engineer will contribute to the design choices, because their understanding of how the product will be developed can greatly influence what are the most effective and, many times, the most innovative choices. The Engineer is like a building Contractor, the person responsible for professionally constructing the building. The overall quality of the building is dependent on their craftsmanship and ability to adhere to the blueprints and interior design specifications. A shoddily constructed building will at best look unprofessional and at worst collapse. A professionally constructed building will be built exactly to the blueprints, only deviating when something isn’t working or can be done differently with better results. The final product is the completed building and that is the ultimately what is judged as successful or not. Now trade out Contractor with Engineer, blueprints for wireframes, interior design specs for visual designs, and completed building for final software product. A software product, just like a building, will only be as good as the designs used to develop it. To put the design onus on the engineer is asking them to spend additional time doing a job that is outside of their area of expertise.

There are a lot of definitions and descriptions for UX Design, but fundamentally the basics are really simple to understand. The complexity is in how to apply these basics to designing the UX for a specific product, because that takes a much greater understanding of the nuances for each component and the people involved on the project. Once you understand these basics, then you can start to dive into the nuances for your UX Design project. The best way to ensure a successful UX Design is to include a UX Designer at the very beginning, during the initial planning, to help influence the right UX Design strategy, including the appropriate design processes and the appropriate UX Design team members. Making these decisions later in the product development may negatively impact the final product with a sub-optimal design and higher development costs. It'd be the same as allowing your Contractor to start constructing the building without having any blueprints and also asking them to tell you what it will cost to finish the project.