What is user experience?

- User experience, often abbreviated to the letters UX, is a general term for all aspects of the interaction that users of a product or service have with that product and with the company that provided it. Those users might be customers, employees, suppliers, or just general members of the public. In its narrowest sense user experience refers to the immediate interface design of the product or site. But more broadly user experience also encompasses other aspects of the interaction, like any associated paperwork or packaging, marketing materials and advertising, or interacting with the company online, via a call center, or in a store or an office. User experience also extends to impressions of the company's brand and general philosophy and how that makes users feel about their own lives. If a product makes people feel good or gives them a sense of confidence, that might initially be down to clever marketing. But sustaining that feeling over time is entirely the result of good user experience. Because the term user experience is so broad, there are several different roles associated with creating that experience. The best way to put different UX roles into context is to follow a product through the development life cycle. Following the process from beginning to end let's you see who the stakeholders are, what work happens, and how it takes place. Product development starts with a planning phase. What should the product do? How should it do that? Is there a market for it? User researchers help product planners and the marketing team identify user needs. Amanda Stockwell's UX Foundations research course gives a great overview of the methods that user researchers use. During early product specification, user experience people also often facilitate design thinking exercises to learn about customers' true needs and create innovative ways to meet those needs. You can learn more about the design thinking process in my courses on understanding and implementing design thinking. UX people often have to help translate the product planner's ideas into specifications that developers can understand. We do this using the common language of user needs and behaviors, often called interaction design. My course in interaction design for the web covers the basic psychological principles that let you construct interfaces. Diane Cronenwett's course takes a deeper dive into interaction design, exploring each of the key platforms, processes, and project types you'll encounter as a UX designer. Once you have some initial ideas for an interface Diane's course on paper prototyping will help you quickly get those ideas mocked up in a way that the team and your users can easily relate to without investing in real code. At this early stage in a development project, there's plenty of room for quick and dirty user research activities to quickly test out ideas. Amanda Stockwell's course on guerrilla research techniques shows you how. She also has a course specifically for lean and agile teams called UX Research: Lean Experimentation. Once those paper prototype interface designs are tested the team will move into development. Now user experience team members finalize the interaction design, create the visual design, and user test the early builds of the product. I put together a course that covers this more formal user testing process from beginning to end, giving you a solid foundation to run different types of user tests yourself. Some teams use style guides and design systems to ensure design consistency. These are normally created by the user experience team. You can learn more about this in my course, UX Foundations: Style Guides and Design Systems. Smart teams will also have early involvement from information architecture, content strategy, and accessibility experts. I would consider all of these roles to be part of the user experience. My course UX Foundations: Information Architecture shows you how the structure of your information on your site can make or break the interaction. Watch Morten Rand-Hendriksen's course on content strategy to learn the mechanics behind creating compelling content. Derek Featherstone's course, UX Foundations: Accessibility shows you how some simple design decisions can open up your product to a much wider audience by providing equal access and opportunity to people with a diverse range of hearing, movement, site, and cognitive abilities. UX work tends to be front loaded in the development process. Well, successful UX work anyway. Often UX people are dragged in late in the process to try and fix things that would never have been an issue if they'd been involved earlier. By the time the product's in release planning it's past the point that UX can have much influence beyond tiny pieces of fit and finish work. UX team members tend to start focusing on early work for the next iteration of the product at this time so that the rest of the development team can hit the ground running as soon as they move off the current release.