Throughout this post I will be sharing some helpful introductory videos from CareerFoundry which present an introduction to UX Design Thinking.

User experience (UX), is any experience a user has with a product or service, as well as everything part of that experience:  customer service, technology, emails, the list goes on . . . It is everything a user encounters with respect to a product or service.

As Don Norman has stated:

“User experience encompasses all aspects of the end-user’s interaction with the company, its services, and its products.” – Don Norman, Cognitive Scientist & User Experience Architect

UX designers focus on what the user wants to accomplish and the context or environment in which the user is trying to reach their goal. UX design is all about finding the most useful and efficient path (what is sometimes called the “happy path”) for the user to take toward accomplishing their goal. UX, as you can imagine, is all about the user and their experience with the product or service.

“UX is focused on the user’s journey to solve a problem; UI is focused on how a product’s surfaces look and function.” – Ken Norton, Partner at Google Ventures, former Product Manager at Google.

Here is a video from CareerFoundry which offers a nice overview of UX Design.

As I mention throughout UXer Musings, UX Design encompasses aspects from several different fields. The work of UX Design is generally broken down into four main disciplines: Experience Strategy (ExS), Interaction Design (IxD), User Research (UR) and Information Architecture (IA). These are collectively known as the UX Design Quadrant Model.

Experience Strategy (ExS)

Experience Strategy is devising a holistic business strategy, incorporating both the customer’s needs and those of the orgnaization.

Interaction Design (IxD)

Interaction design looks at how the user interacts with a system, considering all interactive elements such as buttons, page transitions and animations.

User Research (UR)

UX design is about identifying a problem and designing the solution. This requires research and feedback from existing or potential customers. During the research phase, UX designers gather both qualitative and quantitative data through surveys, interviews, and usability tests to make good design decisions. An important step in the process is to also create what are known as user personas so the UX designer can think about the desing from the point of view of the typical user.

Information Architecture (IA)

Information architecture is the organization of information and content in a meaningful and accessible way. This is essential in helping the user to navigate around a product or service.

What UX Designers Do (in a nutshell)

UX designers work to make products, services and technology as user-friendly and accessible as possible — to create a positive user experience.  Here is another great CareerFoundry video.

The Design Thinking Process

UX designers use a Design Thinking Process, which can be broken down into into four different stages: inspiration, conceptualization, iteration and exposition. Within each stage there are specific tasks the UX designer employs (more on those in a later blog post on The Desing Thinking Process).

Throughout the process, UX designers conduct competitive analysis (Inspiration: Understand), interviews with users (Inspiration: Observe), user personas (Conceptualization: POV), userflows and wireframes (Conceptualization: Ideate), prototypes (Iteration: Prototype), user testing (Iteration: Test), explain the process in a story to stakeholders (Exposition: Story Telling), and present their work to developers (Exposition: Presentation).

Here is a quick video from CareerFoundry on The Design Thinking Process.

This gives a quick look at UX Design Thinking. For more on the subject, check out a great article by Emily Stevens, titled What Is UX Design?, on the CareerFoundry blog. Emily’s article has some more details on what I touched upon here, as well as the videos I have included.