What Do UX Designers Actually Do?

Part One of a Four-Part Series About UX Design

This is the question that frequently comes up when I tell people what I do for a living. And when I try to explain what my job is all about, I always end up cutting it short after seeing my listener’s confusion.

But the reality of what I do is much more complex and deserves a better and deeper explanation. That’s why I wrote this series of articles about UX (user experience) design, partly so I can send this link the next time I’m asked about my job, but also to clarify some misconceptions about a UX designer’s role.

In my research for the most appropriate and rigorous definition of UX design, I asked some colleagues to share their own definitions. Here are their responses:

All of these various responses are valid, and as you can see, several words are repeated: process, product, and user.

My personal definition of UX design is:

Many people confuse UX with UI (user interface). UI is a very important part of UX design, but they are not the same thing.

UI is the method by which the user interacts with a product or service. This includes keyboards, mice, controllers or even the user’s body (VR) or voice (VUI). In the case of graphic representations, we call these elements GUI (graphic user interface), such as console menus, the interface of a desktop or mobile operating system, and almost any web or app.

One of the best examples to clarify the difference between UI and UX design is video games. In this example with Tetris, we can see how the game’s UI evolved over time while keeping its UX mostly intact:

Some people also confuse UX with usability, but they are not the same. In many common definitions of UX, concepts that refer to the product being easy to understand, easy to use, pleasant, satisfactory, etc. are used. These terms are actually more related to usability, and they may or may not be part of the user experience.

Here is a simple way to think about it:

UX and usability generally go hand-in-hand. It goes without saying that when we are designing a user experience, we want it to be usable. But there are some specific cases where good UX does not necessarily mean good usability. Let me use the video game Dark Souls as an example.

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