What is the definition of UX?
Dan Saffer, designer and author
[UX is] the umbrella term to cover all aspects of a system, product, or service that an end-user comes into contact with. All design disciplines mostly fall under the UX umbrella, as do things like content creation, data visualization, ergonomics and human factors, information architecture, and some aspects of engineering
UXnet.org and Interaction-Design.org
User Experience is the quality of experience a person has when interacting with a specific design.
Nielsen Norman Group
UX encompasses all aspects of the end-user's interaction with the company, its services, and its products
The first requirement for an exemplary user experience is to meet the exact needs of the customer, without fuss or bother. Next comes simplicity and elegance that produce products that are a joy to own, a joy to use.
True user experience goes far beyond giving customers what they say they want, or providing checklist features.
In order to achieve high-quality user experience in a company's offerings there must be a seamless merging of the services of multiple disciplines, including engineering, marketing, graphical and industrial design, and interface design.
It's important to distinguish the total user experience from the user interface (UI), even though the UI is obviously an extremely important part of the design. As an example, consider a website with movie reviews. Even if the UI for finding a film is perfect, the UX will be poor for a user who wants information about a small independent release if the database only contains movies from the major studios.
We should also distinguish UX and usability: According to the definition of usability, it is a quality attribute of the UI, covering whether the system is easy to learn, efficient to use, pleasant, and so forth. Again, this is very important, and again total UX is an even broader concept.
usabilitybok.org
Every aspect of the user’s interaction with a product, service, or company that make up the user’s perceptions of the whole. User experience design as a discipline is concerned with all the elements that together make up that interface, including layout, visual design, text, brand, sound, and interaction. UE works to coordinate these elements to allow for the best possible interaction by users.
wikipedia.com
User eXperience (UX) is about how a person feels about using a system. User experience highlights the experiential, affective, meaningful and valuable aspects of human-computer interaction (HCI) and product ownership, but it also covers a person’s perceptions of the practical aspects such as utility, ease of use and efficiency of the system. User experience is subjective in nature, because it is about an individual’s performance, feelings and thoughts about the system. User experience is dynamic, because it changes over time as the circumstances change.
use-design.com
User experience stands for the quality of a global experience as perceived by a person (user) interacting with a system.
Common UXD attributes
Common roles for UX Designers compiled from various job descriptions, loosely countouring 3 sections ranging from user-focused to technology-focused:
- field research
- geathering and organizing statistics
- create user tests
- face to face interviewing
- creating personas
- product design
- brainstorm coordination
- requirenment / feature writing
- information architecture
- usability
- presentation and speaking
- prototyping
- interaction design
- interface design and layout
- confortable with visual / graphic design principles
- produce content style guides
- working tightly with programmers
- design culture evangelism
[above] Envis Preciseley based on
http://www.kickerstudio.com/2008/12/the-disciplines-of-user-experience/ by Dan Saffer
[above] Common role distribution for a tech company
Is UX smoke and mirrors?
Jakub Linowski, a User Interface Designer
Yes, UX as a term is rubbish and doesn't bring much value to design.
1. You cannot measure UX.
There is no measurable criteria which stands out uniquely for UX that helps to separate out the good from the bad - quantitatively I mean. To say "I've just considered the user experience to be good" or "I'm empathetic to customers" isn't adequate. You can be an empathetic designer as well, without having to be an empathetic user experience designer.
Alternatively when you look at fields like cognitive psychology, graphic design, marketing, UI design then you can use various criteria such as: task completion, time to completion, readability, legibility, conversion rates, drop off rates, etc to help guide your design for good or for bad. If UX doesn't really have anything that stands out uniquely from other established disciplines, then it's fluff. Are we saying that smiles are good experience and frowns or tears are not? What is good UX? It's 2014 and I still haven't seen a solid answer.
2. You cannot design a user experience. Experience is way too personal and the situations which people find themselves in are way too non-linear, dynamic and unpredictable for designers to claim arrogantly that they can design someone's else experience. You can only claim that you are a designer of X if you have a predictable and repeatable effect on X. Experience is too chaotic to claim this.
3. Saying that UX is an umbrella term which is some mishmash of UI design, marketing, copy writing, graphic design, interaction design, typography, visual design, product design, software design, etc.... doesn't help answer what UX really is. It's just a cover up through over generalization. All those articles about how UX is so much bigger, better, faster, stronger than UI design doesn't help either.
UX is a hot air term. :)
Benjamin Hersh, designer + artist
short answer: yes and no
longer answer: there are plenty of bullshit artists in the profession, but a company that never thinks about ux is likely to make a lousy product.
on the bullshit side, the fact is that there are no experts in people, at least not in the same way there might be experts in javascript or metal fatigue. many people sell themselves as experts, and many people buy their bullshit. it's unfortunate, but not unique to ux.
and of course, not all ux folks are bullshitters. a humble ux designer knows the limits of their understanding, and seeks validation through testing and careful measurement. ux can (and should, imo) resemble a kind of experimental, scientific inquiry. it will never be certain, but it can be honest and effective.
now, to the real point: if ux were all smoke and mirrors, companies that invested heavily in it would not fare better than their counterparts. this is clearly not the case. consider a few success stories in tech:
Apple: its superb product design has been a crucial part of its success
Drop Box: its usability set it way apart from countless similar services
Smule: its apps are fun because they're designed to be fun
Airbnb: compare it to Couch Surfing, no wonder it won the mainstream
Mint: their entire selling point is that it's better designed than your average banking website
Turbo Tax: seriously, compare it to doing taxes without it
good ux isn't strictly necessary or sufficient for success of every product, but in some cases it's both, and it never hurts.
Design Defined
Since to me, exploring the concept of UX seems to lack without a general definition for the discipline of Design and also because the term "design" is so often abussed, it feels I need to clarify what design is about.
In this respect Laszlo Moholy-Nagy of Bauhaus brings it home for me:
“Design is thinking in relationships. It is the integration of
technological, social, and economical requirements, biological
necessities, and the psychological effects of materials, shape,
color, volume and space.”
So it might be a little more to it than knowing a few Photoshop shortcuts...
Key reads on UX
by Steve Krug
by Susan Weinschenk
by Eric Reiss
by Above The Fold
by Steve Krug
by Jesse James Garrett
So.. what is UX again?
My impression is the term “UX designer”, both by its vagueness and current trendiness is becoming slightly meaningless. We’ve certainly seen it refer to a whole range of jobs, from more research-oriented roles, ones with a marketing orientation through to more visual design and front-end development roles. In the worst cases it’s become a replacement term for “web designer” (maybe with some more references to usability or user-centred design added).From what I've gathered, the core competencies for a UX designer should include the following (but not necessarily be limited to them):
- understanding users and user needs (e.g. through research)
- interaction design, including user-centred design and usability testing
- user interface design (i.e. visual design)
- information architecture