Exactly what is "User Experience Design," anyway?

User experience design is a method of design that deals with the way people interact with a product—usually a digital product, such as a web site or a computer application. According to Wikipedia's definition, UX design "...impact[s] a user's perception of a device or system," and that's a pretty good way to describe it.

Take this page, for example. Being a UX designer, it was important for me to present my work, my history, and all the other content on this site in a way you could easily navigate and read. Theme, style, usability, accessibility, and countless other considerations had to be made in order to present you with a good experience while visiting my site.

But did I really have to try so hard to get all this just right? After all, if you're visiting my site just to get a feel for who I am and what I've done, then the content in these pages (as well as the amount of content here) is the important thing... Right?

Right. Ultimately, content is still king, and people still surf the Web in search of fresh, valid information. But if my site didn't look good or feel right, your initial perceptions of it would have been less favorable. So by designing this site to look nice and work well, I can help influence your perception of the overall package.

Oh, so it's graphic design, then?

No. Or at least, not exactly. In highly interactive systems, the visual design of a product has a lot to do with its marketability and salability, but it doesn't have much to do with how well it actually works in the user's hands. And that's where the best parts of UX design shine through.

Although I previously used this web site as an example of a nicely implemented UX design, the truth is that it lacks a high degree of interactivity, which is the skeleton on which good UX design hangs. Oh, there's the navigation menu you can click on, and the caricature of my face does something kind of funny if you hover your mouse over it (!), but by and large this site lacks the kind of application-level interactivity you might find at, say, Amazon.com or Travelocity.

Places like those can be a real challenge to use. Because of the amount of interactivity involved, there's a lot that can go wrong, interaction-wise, on those types of sites. Think about it: at Travelocity—where you might go to buy airline tickets—you can shop, browse, compare, select, hold, email, pay, track, modify, and search. You can sign in, sign up, sign out, join, update, monitor, research, reserve, and cancel... And that's probably just the tip of the travel iceberg.

There's a lot you can do on today's e-commerce sites, and every one of those activities can quickly become an online nightmare if they're not designed just right. Factor in the natural caution people feel when making a high-dollar online purchase, and you begin to understand the need for effective UX design. That's why Travelocity employs a whole cadre of UX specialists to make sure that your experience isn't just nightmare-free, but intuitive and, hopefully, even delightful. (Full disclosure: I worked at Travelocity as a UX designer, so I know how hard everyone there works to make things just right.)

So it's not (or not just) graphic design, it's... What?

It's a lot of everything. It's interaction design, structured navigation, labeling, wayfinding, usability, layout, flow, copywriting, handicapped accessibility... It's about making things make sense and apprehending what will (and will not) work under any given circumstance. We interview users, define their goals (as well the tasks they accomplish to achieve those goals), test our initial designs, change them when they fail, test again, and then evaluate and measure those designs under real-world conditions.

It's a big job, but it matters. A lot. If a product isn't clear and easy to use, people won't use it (or they'll hate it if they absolutely have to use it). And in a competitive economy where there are a lot of options (like Travelocity vs. Expedia vs. Orbitz), users can quickly move from one product offering to another until they find one that gets things right.

On the other hand, when something just works, it's a pleasure. It's delightful, and that's the end-goal of every UX designer. We want to delight you, and we know you want to be delighted. The good news is that there's a long way to go, and enough bad user experiences out there to keep us employed for a good while to come. But we'll keep going at it, because, just like you, we want to be delighted too.