UX and Experience Design. What’s the Difference?

“Congrats on your new role as Head of UX!”

Thank you kindly, but UX and Experience Design are not the same. Before you get your knickers in a knot, let me explain. As some old folk dude once sang, times they are a changin’, and we have to get comfortable with the fact that what is true one day might not be true the next. For example, the earth was flat, then it was round, and now it is flat again (supposedly). The definition of things change over time, and UX and Experience Design are not immune.

What is UX?

UX legend Don Norman has had a lot to say about what UX is and means over the years, much of which is treated like gospel to the converted. He popularised the term UX, short for User Experience, back in the 90s: “I invented the term because I thought human interface and usability were too narrow. I wanted to cover all aspects of the person's experience with the system including industrial design graphics, the interface, the physical interaction and the manual. Since then the term has spread widely, so much so that it is starting to lose its meaning.”

Even Don himself doesn’t shy away from challenging his own thinking. So as we enter this faster, fluctuating future that is reshaping our world, why wouldn’t we challenge the status quo? Don also famously said, “‘user experience’ encompasses all aspects of the end-user’s interaction with the company, its services, and its products.” Is this statement still relevant amongst the increasing complexity design faces? The scope and scale of designing for experiences has transcended the 'user', and UX today is aligned to the design of the detailed interactions a person has with (primarily digital) products and services.

What is Experience Design?

As I’ve mentioned before, the term ‘Experience Design’ can be quite misleading, because it implies Experience Design is a singular design discipline with a tangible outcome. Considering that experiences are affective, subjective and completely personal, it’s pretty much impossible to design an experience. But as Jil Sander suggested, you can design for it. Another design legend, Ronald Jones, describes the purpose of Experience Design as being "to persuade, stimulate, inform, envision, entertain, and forecast events, influencing meaning and modifying human behavior." He also says it requires synergy across disciplines and between ideas, methods and theories.

Designing for experience requires the inclusion of many people who bring a multitude of perspectives and skills to the context of what they are designing for, including people, business, brand, environment, products, marketing, packaging, retail, employees, exponential unknowns (because design doesn't happen inside the vacuum of a journey map) and beyond. On top of the context, multi-dimensional, human-centric levers can used to influence the experience including time, attention, scale, scope, type of interaction, triggers, emotions and memory. Experience Design today is about arranging stimuli, moments and interactions to influence behaviour, expectations and memory of people within a particular context.

So what’s the difference? Maybe it's semantics, but the short answer is: if you make stuff, or you are involved in making stuff, experience is an unavoidable outcome - whether you intentionally design for it or not. Everyone who is part of the design process - strategy, account management, marketers, creatives, designers (of every kind including UX), technologists, project managers, stakeholders, users - contribute to designing for experience: some at a detailed level (UX), others at different scales. Either way, UX and Experience Design are not the same, but they overlap and are related to each other. Experience Design is part of UX and UX is part of Experience Design.

Here's a picture I made that explores designing for experience:

Big shout out to Saiful Nasir for inspiring this post. He wrote this really interesting piece about Experience Design recently.

Chirryl-Lee is a transdisciplinary designer who helps people invent and make things that can change the world. She is Head of Experience Design at Isobar, a global, full-service, digital agency with innovation at its heart, where she stewards Experience Design across Hong Kong, Australia and the region.