What do you UX designers do? Good question. One of the things I like most about user experience (UX) design is that it is not just one thing. UX design is both creative and analytical. UX design is putting people first to design an experience which is best for people who use a product or service. How cool is that? And I love that UX design is no one single task. In fact, UX is all about the process.

UX design is both art and science. As is stated in my CareerFoundry course:

“Creating successful UX design requires the imaginative skills, techniques, and trainings of an artist, as well as the analytical research, discovery, and methodological processes of a scientist in order to fully explore and understand users’ needs.” (CareerFoundry: The Role of a UX Designer)

Over the course of a project a UX designer will focus on research, design, testing, and implementation. And it is not always a straight line through the four phases. The UX design process (remember, it is all about the process) often involves revisiting initial designs after getting test results. The UX designer works to refine the design to achieve the best user experience possible.

As part of a product team, the UX designer works with a product manager, perhaps other designers, and developers. The product manager oversees all aspects of the product. The designer works on the aesthetics. And the developers are engineers who build the product (or code the software).

Everyone has an important role to play. The role of the UX designer is to determine how all the pieces of the product flow together and conduct research to ensure the product works well for the user.

A key task in thinking like a UXer is understanding the impact of user experience design across many different products (physical and software).

Here is a sample of my assignment in looking at the Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing dashboard. KDP is something I have personally encountered as a user over the years as an independent book publisher, so this was an opportunity to look at the tool thinking like a user experience designer. It was interesting and insightful.