EP4. What is UX and what does a UX designer do all day?

Before you dive into anything. It's important to define what it REALLY is, what it means to you, and what it means to the people it will effect. I dove into this question "What is UX design? Really?" about 10 years ago.

"What is UX design?" is a question I’ve been asked a lot of times in job interviews, from family members, and from prospective clients. If it is a field you wish to participate in as well. It will be essential for you to establish an answer in your own words that means something to you and translates easily enough to the listener.

Wikipedia explains it as: "User experience design (UXD, UED, or XD) is the process of supporting user behavior through usability, usefulness, and desirability provided in the interaction with a product. User experience design encompasses traditional human–computer interaction (HCI) design and extends it by addressing all aspects of a product or service as perceived by users."

Don Norman who coined the term User Experience in 1993 while working at apple Defines it this way: "'User experience'" encompasses all aspects of the end-users interaction with the company, its services, and its products." You can also hear him talk about it in this quick video.

In my humble opinion I define UX design in a couple ways:

From the perspective of the designer.

UX design is the iterative refinement of a product or service to bring value to a user. It focuses on the desirability, feasibility and usability of a product.

From the perspective of the user.

UX is the perception I have when using a product or service. Do I find it useful, desirable and can it be implemented easily into my life?

When I boil it down, this is what I come up with.

Essentially to me, UX design is about improving the human experience. Even it means you're just making someone’s day that much easier. It balances organizational objectives with human nature and needs. If your intent is to improve someone’s experience and you can achieve that, your organization could be successful. If you don't improve someone’s experience, then it will probably fail.

Therefore I now define UX design as:

The iterative design of digital products and services to improve human interaction.

So what does a UX designer do all day?

A big disclaimer to this one. Not every designer works the same, has the same responsibilities or roles to fill. This can look different depending on who you are, where your focus lies, and what your company, team, or clients expect from you. Also, it has a lot to do with the individual designer, where their strengths are, where they tend to focus their attention and how their team divides responsibilities.

Designing

Yes! A good portion of your day will be spent heads down in Sketch, InVision, XD, Figma, or any other prototyping tool you choose to use. This can be high-fidelity designs or low, but you should be prototyping and learning almost every day.

You should be prototyping and learning almost every day

By prototyping, I mean creating mock-ups that are as close to an interactive experience as possible. This allows not only the designer but the rest of the team as well to interact with an experience like an app that's similar to what it would be like for a customer to use the actual product.

By learning, I mean using the prototype to test with the business team to ensure it meets requirements. Test with the development team to ensure the feasibility of building this design and test with the folks who in the end will be using the app to make sure it's actually something they'll want to use.

Strategic Thinking

Designers need to help the business connect with users to gain insights into their needs and wants. This is an essential part of the designer's role. Also helping them develop the requirements of what you will be building is a good skill set to acquire. The designer's role in this phase is to really connect with the business team to build trust and establish goals, vision, and the desired outcome the team will be driving towards.

Actual day-to-day work may include crafting and participating in user or customer interviews. Analyzing customer pain points and highlighting opportunities. Crafting competitive research, creating user personas, collecting inspiration, journey map creation and again, the list goes on. The important part is that you and the team are forming a bond and a connection around who your customer is, what your strategy is to help them, plus how and on what time frame you'll do it in.

Divergent Thinking

Ideating, iterating, and collaborating are key to this phase. Design, Test, Repeat! You'll be sketching, wire-framing, card-sorting, plotting the Information Architecture, prototyping, testing, etc..., etc...

So you've helped the team gather enough information to know who your customer is and roughly how you'll go about helping them. Now it's time for the pen to hit the paper. Or marker to hit whiteboard, or sharpie to hit post it or mouse to click the screen. You get the point, now is the time to generate as many ideas as possible. Now could be a great time to walk the team through an idea-generating workshop.

Convergent Thinking

Developers need your final typography, spacing, grids, icons, and artwork ready to go. Also, you'll need to work closely with the product team to design for almost every imaginable scenario a user may encounter while using your app. So a designer needs to be good and fast at whichever design tool they'll be using. It's incredible how much time can be spent designing error states and messages to help your user when things break down. Get faster so it doesn't break you down.

Facilitating and participating in workshops

There are meetings, lots of meetings. Workshops are better, and if you can't get that. A meeting with a purpose and action will have to do. As a designer, you have to present you're work a lot! Designers need to get comfortable facilitating activities and presentations that don't suck.

Typical?

So as you can see. A typical day as a UX designer is not very typical at all. It is fun though 😉

What's your favorite part of the day?