What is UX Design? 15 User Experience Experts Weigh In

Author: Spencer Lanoue (UserTesting Blog) · Published: September 16, 2015 (rewritten and redated March 27, 2024) · URL: https://www.usertesting.com/blog/2015/09/16/what-is-ux-design-15-user-experience-experts-weigh-in/

One-line: A marketing-blog roundup that asks fifteen practitioners to define UX design for a beginner — and whose most useful answer is that the term has no agreed definition at all.

Summary

Lanoue, then a marketer at UserTesting, opens by conceding the point the rest of the post circles: “there’s no commonly accepted definition.” UX design, he writes, spans interaction design, information architecture, visual design, usability and human-computer interaction. He borrows a working definition from a paper in the Oxford journal Interacting With Computers — the goal is to “improve customer satisfaction and loyalty through the utility, ease of use, and pleasure provided in the interaction with a product” — then asks fifteen practitioners how they would explain it to someone learning it for the first time.

The answers sort into a few camps:

• UX design as a process that always happens. Laura Klein (Users Know, UX for Lean Startups): somebody makes the decisions about how the human and the product will interact, “whether it’s intentional or not”; good UX is making those decisions so they serve both users and the business. Steve Portigal (Interviewing Users) calls it the creative and analytical process of determining what a thing is going to be and do.
• You can’t design an experience, only design for one. Dan Makoski (then VP of Design at Capital One), crediting Liz Sanders: an experience is a personal moment people feel, not something designers own. The word “for” buys humility — and he adds that “user” is a narrow, slightly offensive label for humans.
• UX as emotion. Tomer Sharon: “the art and science of generating positive emotions” among people who use a product.
• UX as every touchpoint, not just the screen. Paul Boag points to Disney’s MagicBand, which creates an experience with no graphical interface at all. Joshua Porter extends it to email, phone manner, return policies and release notes, and predicts the letters “UX” will eventually fade because all of that will simply be understood as part of designing a product. Emily Stewart (UserTesting): the value you deliver at every touchpoint, stitched together into a perception of the product.
• UX as a commitment. Marieke McCloskey: building with the customer in mind, validated through real feedback and iteration. Whitney Hess: developing products “with purpose, compassion, and integrity,” balancing “making money and making meaning.”
• UX as anticipation. Reed Jones (Autodesk): when done well, the designed elements disappear and the user is delighted to get something they didn’t think to ask for.

The original ends with a bonus dissent from Peter Merholz (then at Jawbone): “There is no such thing as ‘UX Design.’” Most people mean interaction design plus information architecture; some add research, strategy, visual design or prototyping, and the variable definition “only leads to confusion.”

The 2024 rewrite. The post now lives at an undated URL under a “UserTesting” byline, dated March 27, 2024. It keeps ten of the original contributors, swaps five (Makoski, Dan Trenkner, Stewart, Brent Summers and Erik Levitch out; Jason Ogle, Steve Krug, Martyn Reding, Scott Johnsen and Cory Lebson in), and drops the Merholz bonus. The sharpest new entry is Krug’s (Don’t Make Me Think): UX descended from ergonomics, user-centered design and usability until “in the wake of the success of the iPhone it morphed into the current 46 subspecialties,” and from “its noble heritage of advocacy for the user” it has shown “an alarming tendency to lean towards advocacy for the producer.”

Full text

Archived privately against link rot, both the original 2015 text and the 2024 rewrite: ../attachments/what-is-ux-design-15-user-experience-experts-weigh-in/what-is-ux-design-15-user-experience-experts-weigh-in.md

Connections

• User-Centered Design — the umbrella term several contributors reach for. Krug names user-centered design as one of UX’s ancestors, and Makoski’s “design for” is the same stance Don Norman takes in The Design of Everyday Things.
• User Research — the discipline the post keeps separating out from design: Cory Lebson’s answer is that he is a researcher, not a UX designer, working on a parallel slice of the same pie.
• UserTesting — the publisher; the post is content marketing for a user-research platform.