What is a UX Designer?

A holistic, multidisciplinary approach to the design of user interfaces for digital products, defining their form, behavior, and content. User experience design integrates interaction design, industrial design, information architecture, information design, visual interface design, user assistance design, and user-centered design, ensuring coherence and consistency across all of these design dimensions.

– Pabini Gabriel-Petit, UX Matters.

User experience (UX) design means different things to different people. In fact, if you ask three people to define what UX is, you will likely hear three different answers. However, most everyone will agree that someone in UX design role is primarily concerned with the total experience of a user as they interact with a product or service that is meant to a specific user problem. UX consists of users, content, business goals and how the users interact with the material.

UserTesting.com defines UX designer this way:

"UX designers are responsible for ensuring that the company delivers a product or service that meets the needs of the customer and allows them to seamlessly achieve their desired outcome.

UX designers work closely with UI designers, UX researchers, marketers, and product teams to understand their users through research and experimentation. They use the insights gained to continually iterate and improve experiences, based on both quantitative and qualitative user research."

Since its growing popularity in the late 2000s, UX has been adopted by different markets. Jobs now range from generalist UX design positions to highly-specialized UX roles in larger companies. It's important to note that how a company views UX will likely dictate the job of their staff UX designers. In other words, wherever a designer works, an agency, a startup, an in-house company or a consultancy, will determine precisely what role they take on at that company.

For example, at Airbnb, “Experience Designers” have backgrounds in interaction, visual and service design:

"What we design goes beyond the screen and impacts all aspects of our users' journey (hence the name Experience Design). Sometimes we design small adjustments to a page or flow, sometimes we’re designing wholly new product experiences. Both have a big impact. We are all hybrids and we work at all stages of the product process—from concept to launch—in collaboration with researchers, product managers and engineers. The work is challenging. It stretches us to think online and offline and embrace all cultures."

— Katie Dill, UX Designer from Airbnb, 2015.

Google tends to be more specialized and focus on product-focused UX patterns:

[Google] UX Designers on a daily day basis design interfaces navigation models UX patterns for a lot of different apps and surfaces... I helped change the UI in a way that's more usable and more efficient to users...

— Sun Park, User Experience Designer from Google, 2017

An 'Experience Lead' at Huge agency researches, strategizes and defines designs:

Experience Leads oversee an interdisciplinary team (including Visual and Interaction Designers, Content Strategists and Copywriters, Developers and more) through research, strategy development, concepting, product definition and design.

A successful Experience Lead at Huge is an innovative designer, a decisive product owner, a helpful mentor, a team player and a skilled client partner all rolled into one. Our Leads push the work through strong collaboration and challenge the team to think beyond what’s expected. This is a hands-on role: our Leads create designs, personas, site maps and whatever is needed to communicate the team's thinking. (Source: Huge Inc. job description)

Part researcher, part strategist, part marketer, part analyst, UX Designers are well-versed in:

• Research (competitive analysis)
• Empathetic design (understanding users)
• Content creation (strategy, copywriting)
• Information architecture (wireframing)
• Prototyping (testing and experimentation)
• Collaboration (working closely with developers and visual designers to execute designs)
• Analytics (tracking results)
  
  

UX Student Interviews

To get a better sense of UX design as it relates to the program at Flatiron School (powered by Designation), check out a few interviews from our alumni:

From banking to UX design.

(5 min read) by Qui Dixon (Basil cohort grad), BSwift

Former video editor to turned UX designer.

(5 min read) by Kyle Howard (Yucca cohort grad), Bose

Coffee meets UX design.

(5 min read) by Anabelle Zee (Obsidian cohort grad), Pandora

Articles

Explaining UX design to my sister

by Kaleigh Flynn of Microsoft (5 min read)
A few weeks ago, I was talking to my younger sister about careers. Me: “…So that’s when I decided I’d like to focus on becoming a UX designer rather than staying in front-end development.” Sister: “Well, what is UX?” Me: generic textbook definition of usability and user focused design Sister: “So… a web designer?” Me: “Well, not exactly. I think what you mean is a UI designer. They definitely work hand-in-hand but focus on different aspects of the same story. Ya know?” Sister: “But there are enough templates out there for me to make a website so what is the point?” Read more

The many roles in UX

by Per Magnus Sköld of Mako Design + Invent (5 min read)
An Industrial Designer has always been an Industrial Designer. While there are several skills that an Industrial Designer must employ that are shared with other occupations, such as Graphic Design, 3D rendering visualization, 3D cad, faux-Engineer, and of course, sketcher/artist/illustrator. Sometimes it is the loftier role of Big-picture-thinker, or just as likely, the torch-bearer for keeping the design intent as it goes through the engineering-grinder. But it has always just been…Industrial Designer. Were this ten years ago I would have told you that an Industrial Designer and a Product Designer are the same thing, but as the tides have shifted, this too has changed. Read more

What is UX design?

by 15 UX designers (10 min read)
It’s important to start by saying there’s no commonly accepted definition for UX design. User experience design is a concept that has many dimensions, and it includes a bunch of different disciplines—such as interaction design, information architecture, visual design, usability, and human-computer interaction. But let’s try to get a clearer picture of what that really means. Read more

Videos

What is UX Design? Defining User Experience Design & Explaining the Process

(34 min) Jose and Chris explain what UX Design is by working on the redesign of The Skool's website. User Experience Design (UXD) is the process of enhancing user satisfaction by improving the usability, accessibility, and pleasure provided in the interaction between the user and a product or service.

Idea to appstore | AJSmart.

(16 min) This video is all about taking your idea for an app and the actual process behind building it and delivering it to the appstore.

What Does a UX Designer Do? | Inside Jobs.

(7 min) Colleen Taylor talks with Sarah Harrison, the head of UX design at True&Co. The technology industry today has job titles that you don't really find anywhere else. User experience, or "UX", is one of them. It seems like every tech company is hiring in "UX design" and "UX research", but it's hard for outsiders to know what exactly it is that they do. (available in the U.S. only)

Tools

• InVision Showing and gathering feedback on simple prototypes and designs
• Axure Wireframing and prototyping tool
• Figma A design and prototyping tool that also allows for collaborative work as well as feedback
• Sketch a design and prototyping tool
• Optimizely A tool for comparative and experimental testing
• UserTesting A tool for getting actual users to test our your designs or experiences

UX Mastery has a very comprehensive list list of tools categorized by task or user experience need.

Books

• Lean UX
• About Face
• Designing for the Digital Age
• Don't make me think
• The design of everyday things