What Is User Experience Design, and Why Does It Matter?

UX design, to me, is the ability to consider a product from a user’s perspective, or call it a person’s perspective. It’s connecting their needs and goals with the business needs and goals, and creating a product that fits at that intersection.

UX design is how a person experiences a company or an organization, and that can be through its products or services.

Sometimes there’s confusion about the difference between UI, which is user interface design, and UX, which is user experience design.

Traditionally, UI has really focused on what happens on a particular screen. When you’re interacting with a website, a mobile app, or a kiosk, for example, we’re looking at how elements on the screen relate to one another, where buttons are placed, et cetera.

User experience, though, is about taking a slightly broader lens on that design process. We don’t just look at what happens when you interact with a mobile app. We might think about what happens before someone even picks up their phone to interact with that app, and what happens when they set their phone down again afterwards.

It’s looking at the person, how they use it, and the context of use. What are their needs? What are they feeling? What are their expectations when they come to this product or this tool?

User experience is very important to companies, especially now and even more so in the future, because just having a technology-enabled product is not enough.

It has to be a good experience. People have to get things done that they’re trying to accomplish, and they have to walk away thinking that it was a good experience that they want to tell their friends and family about.

There are a lot of big challenges that face UX today. I think one of the big ones is figuring out what we do with some of the new platforms that are emerging.

Virtual reality is certainly one of them. For several years now, we’ve also had wearables emerging as another type of new platform. How do we move beyond just the computer screen or just the phone to address some of these other types of products that are coming onto the scene?

I think the demand for UX designers is not going to go away anytime soon. Great products are differentiated based on the experience, and sometimes solely the experience.

I think there’s a huge future demand for UX designers. We’ve seen a trend in UX becoming more important, more critical to business, and business is really recognizing that and trying to bring UX in, not only earlier in the development of products, but having UX have a seat at the table in boardroom conversations, at that C-suite level.

There are a lot of companies hiring UX designers right now. It’s a very in-demand type of position. You have companies that are startups, you have companies that are enterprises. It’s really the whole gamut.

We’re seeing companies hire UX designers in droves, and it doesn’t just apply to technology companies or companies you would traditionally associate with UX.

It can be startups that are not even tech-based. It can be established companies that aren’t necessarily thought of as being tech-based.

Big manufacturing corporations and consumer packaged goods companies are bringing design in and making that a key focus area. It doesn’t just have to be the Googles or the Apples of the world. As a UX designer, you can be looking at a wide range of companies as prospective employers.

For people who want to become a UX designer, I think background doesn’t really matter. I’ve worked with folks who have become UX designers who were previously teachers, architects, or business managers. I think the connective tissue is that they are curious and want to solve problems.

The beauty of UX, in my mind, is that people come to this field with a wide variety of backgrounds. There’s a lot of diversity in how people ultimately land on user experience as a career path.

I’ve seen success with people coming in from all different levels of experience and different industries. What it really takes, though, is someone who can handle interactions with other people, help lead, help facilitate workshops, and be creative and explore ideas.

I first got into UX design through the side door. Originally, I was a graphic designer and brand strategist, but I always liked puzzles and I always liked technology. When you combine all those things, UX design was a very attractive industry for me.

CodeCraft specifically has a really interesting and unique approach to teaching.

There are many different tools in UX design, and it doesn’t always have to be on the computer.

We use a lot of approaches to designing digital products, and some of those aren’t always digital approaches. We use our hands, we use paper, we use whiteboards. We try to get our ideas out into a way that we can work with them and have a tangible way to massage them into ideas that work.

We make sure that our classroom is set up with a varying amount of classroom instruction time, but we also save a lot of studio lab time. That allows our students to collaborate, not only with the other students and the clients, but also with the instructors.

Giving them that face-to-face feedback time is really important for them to grow their skill set, but also push their designs forward.