What is User Experience (UX) Design?

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

Elements

Research

User experience design draws from design approaches like human-computer interaction and user-centered design, and includes elements from similar disciplines like interaction design, visual design, information architecture, user research, and others.

Visual design

Visual design, also commonly known as graphic design, user interface design, communication design, and visual communication, represents the aesthetics or look-and-feel of the front end of any user interface.

Information architecture

Information architecture is the art and science of structuring and organizing the information in products and services to support usability and findability.

Interaction design

It is well recognized that the component of interaction design is an essential part of user experience (UX) design, centering on the interaction between users and products.

Usability

Usability is the extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a specified context of use.

Accessibility

Accessibility of a system describes its ease of reach, use, and understanding. In terms of user experience design, it can also be related to the overall comprehensibility of the information and features.

WCAG compliance

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 covers a wide range of recommendations for making Web content more accessible. This makes web content more usable to users in general.

Human–computer interaction

Human–computer interaction is concerned with the design, evaluation and implementation of interactive computing systems for human use and with the study of major phenomena surrounding them.

The difference between UX and UI design

When discussing UX, user interface (UI) design will inevitably crop up. However, it’s important to recognize that, despite often being used interchangeably, UX and UI are two different things.

UI refers to the actual interface of a product, the visual design of the screens a user navigates through when using a mobile app, or the buttons they click when browsing a website.

UI design covers all the visual and interactive elements of a product interface: from typography and color palettes to animations and navigational touch points (such as buttons and scrollbars).