What Is User Experience? Answers From 7 Top UX Designers

If you Google user experience the definition you’ll find is “the overall experience of a person using a product like a website or computer application, especially in terms of how easy or pleasing it is to use.” Sounds straightforward enough.

In the real world, though, real humans are involved with all the quirkiness they bring to the table. They don’t always use sites, apps, or services as designed. We researched what top experts in the field have to say about the user experience, and offer tips to help you navigate along the way.

User Experience Encompasses All Interaction With a Brand

Don Norman & Jakob Nielsen are the co-founders of Nielsen Norman Group, a renowned user experience consulting firm founded in 1998. Both Norman and Nielsen have written some of the most influential books about user experience and design, including “The Design of Everyday Things” and “Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity.”  

According to Norman and Nielsen, the definition of UX is broad and it extends beyond websites or apps.

“‘User experience’ encompasses all aspects of the end-user’s interaction with the company, its services, and its products.”

The pair originally coined the phrase when computers were the primary way users interacted with a brand. But as technology evolved, and consumers began interacting digitally with brands in myriad ways, some in the UX world began referring to this user-brand relationship as the “customer journey.” 

Norman and Nielsen believe that whatever you want to call it, the main point is the same. There are multiple levels of experience and each is equally important in delivering a good experience to your user.

They break things down into three levels:

• Interaction level – the single transaction a user has with a brand. This is where most UX work is done, including things like website and app interfaces using channel-specific strategies.

• Journey level – a multi-step process a user completes to reach a goal. The UX here should tie together the steps a user must take, ensuring consistency and cohesiveness across all steps, channels and interactions.

• Relationship level – the overall, lifetime experience a user has with a brand. Great design means that every user touchpoint is woven together to create a unified, connected, and personalized experience from initial contact to post-sale help.

This means UX shouldn’t be viewed in a vacuum. It doesn’t stop with designing an app that users like. UX teams should be working closely with every team responsible for each customer touchpoint. The end goal is to deliver a seamless, cohesive, on-brand experience no matter where in the journey the user is.

Great UX is Equal Parts Business and Design

Jared Spool has worked in the field of design and usability testing since 1978. He is a writer, researcher, and a former adjunct professor at Tufts University, teaching Experience Design Management. He also co-authored “Web Site Usability: A Designer’s Guide (Interactive Technologies.” He is the co-founder of the Center Centre–a bricks-and-mortar education center for UX designers.

Spool believes that to be successful, UX design cannot exist in a corporate vacuum. UX leaders must build relationships all the way up the ladder to achieve optimal effectiveness.

“No one will buy into your UX design ideas if they can’t see how those ideas matter to them.

This is especially true for your organization’s leadership. They need to see how all those great UX design ideas will push forward their top priority, helping the organization. If they can’t see it, they won’t get behind your great ideas.”

According to Spool, without executive buy-in, even the best design ideas are doomed to fail. He offers three strategies to get C-level support.

• Don’t seek permission, beg forgiveness. Go ahead, design away and hope executive leadership doesn’t notice. This strategy is moderately successful when design teams are small and can fly under the radar. It’s not successful at all when UX scales.
• Don the cloak of a design evangelist. There’s one goal here and that’s to educate executives on great design. It’s usually done with slide decks showing proof of how design has helped other organizations succeed. This approach is rarely successful, as execs are quick to argue their organizations are different.
• Show executives how UX helps the corporate bottom line. Winner winner, chicken dinner. This is the way to the C-suite’s heart. Executives are driven by numbers and money is their love language. When UX leaders talk in dollars to explain the value of design, they can effectively get leadership to see how great design helps the bottom line.

If you’re a UX design leader, learn to talk about your efforts and goals in terms of money and especially profit. It is the only proven strategy to get the executive buy-in you need to succeed and scale.

Use Unconscious Bias for Good

With a UX career spanning more than twenty years, David Dylan Thomas has made it his mission to advocate for inclusive designs and help others understand how bias impacts the design process. 

He’s written about it in depth in his book “Design for Cognitive Bias.” As the host of The Cognitive Bias Podcast, he explores the irrational things people do, why they do it, and how to leverage this knowledge for good in UX design.

“We like to think that we walk into a situation, look at it, and decide which frame to use to think about it. Like we’re choosing a pair of glasses to put on. Here’s the problem: what we don’t realize. What we don’t know we don’t know about ourselves. The glasses were on our face before we even walked into the room.”

One example of bias, according to Thomas, is cognitive bias. It occurs when designers and developers create a solution and inherently believe it is the best solution. They put too much weight on their solution while downplaying any data that might indicate there are better alternatives. This can lead to solutions going to market with big flaws or even harmful outcomes.

Similarly, other biases like notational bias can also lead to potentially negative outcomes. For example, if you build a form with a gender field that is limited to male/female, you risk alienating a lot of identities. They may choose to opt out altogether.

Can bias be used for good? Thomas says yes, but only if you’re aware of them. Things like cognitive fluency and cultural bias, once you recognize them and their potential impacts, can help you design solutions that amplify or avoid certain outcomes.

UX professionals can use Thomas’ insights to improve the design process. Understanding the different types of bias out there, then incorporating solutions based on that information, leads to more inclusive, persuasive, and effective designs.

UX is a Team Sport

Irene Au’s robust UX experience comes from creating and scaling UX teams at Google and Yahoo!. In her current role as Design Partner at Khosla Ventures, she works with start-ups to strengthen design capabilities. She’s also an Adjunct Professor at Stanford University, teaching about advanced product design.

Au’s experience at Google, where user research was completely separate from the design process when she joined, was the catalyst for her to adopt a more integrated approach. As she noted on the GameThinking podcast, 

“I felt like it created too much of a waterfall process. There wasn’t enough generative research being done to help inform and inspire what was being built and designed and why. I wanted to bring research and design closer together.”

Her approach was to decentralize the research component, and bake it into the UX teams. It was a successful strategy.

Bringing design and research teams together is a wise move for any brand. It eliminates information silos, helps design teams make more educated decisions, and gets products to market faster with fewer needs to go back and fix things.

Great UX Requires Minimal Effort from Users

Stephen Krug is the author of “Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability,” which has sold more than 700,000 copies. The book is based on Krug’s experience as a usability consultant who worked with Apple, Bloomberg, Lexus, NPR, and the International Monetary Fund during his 30+ year career. Today he runs the consulting firm, Advanced Common Sense, based in Chestnut Hill, MA.

When it comes to UX, Krug’s premise is to keep things simple.

“If something requires a large investment of time—or looks like it will—it’s less likely to be used.”

His belief is that every website or app should make things as obvious and easy as possible. To do otherwise diminishes the user’s confidence in not just the site but the business behind it.

Some of Krug’s key strategies to make this happen include:

• Design for scanning, not reading. Users don’t want to weed through paragraphs of text. Put the most important information first. Use headers and subheaders to make it even easier to understand. Leverage bullet points (short ones) whenever possible. Use bold (sparingly) for emphasis.
• Use simple and concise language. Skip the $0.50 words and go for basics instead. This strategy and other copywriting techniques will keep things simplified and your user satisfied they can find what they need with minimal effort.
• Organize information in a clear and logical way. Don’t make users work too hard to find what they need. Make their ability to choose a mindless experience.
• Minimize the number of required clicks. This is something you can easily measure. The more clicks, the more likely a user is going to become frustrated. If they get too frustrated, they’ll abandon the site altogether.

Every UX professional should focus on incorporating these tips into every design. The goal is to reduce cognitive load to the bare minimum. Solid user testing strategies will help you pinpoint trouble spots, so you can quickly correct them.

If a user has to work too hard to navigate your site, they’re going to abandon ship fast.

Know Your Internal Audience

Jen Romano, Ph.D. built her UX career at Google, Meta and Goldman Sachs. She’s won awards for her work in UX research, is a past-president of the User Experience Professionals Association (UXPA), and today consults, coaches, and trains individuals and businesses. She also teaches courses at UC Berkeley, University of Maryland, and University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

According to Romano, when it comes to disseminating findings “the most important thing is that your audience actually consumes it.” 

This is true for any research, whether longer-term foundational investigations (who is your audience? What are their pain points?) or more precise analysis (gathering feedback from existing users).

UX teams must be prepared to deliver findings in a way that resonates with their intended audience. Which, according to Romano, means knowing your audience.

You can ask yourself some questions to help guide your approach.

• Who is my audience? This is always step one. Is it the C-suite? The design team? Each audience has its own unique needs.
• What information do they need to make a decision? This helps define how detailed  your information dump will be. For example, top leadership wants concise, data-driven bullet points. Designers, on the other hand, want to dive deep into the nuances of each finding.
• How quickly do they need research results? Designers and developers need real-time research information to help guide their work. The faster you can get the results to them, the faster they can pivot and make changes.
• How do they like to get information? Present your results in a way that your audience is most likely to digest quickly and easily. This means both format and delivery channel. Slide decks, bullet point lists, executive summaries. Slack channels, emails, video calls. All are on the table and useful in the right scenario.

The point is to meet your audience where they are and make it as easy as possible for them to digest the research findings you put so much work into gathering. And do this as fast as possible.

UX is Just One Piece of the Puzzle 

David Hamill has been working as a UX professional for more than twenty years. During that time he’s worked with a variety of clients, from startups to global organizations including Skyscanner, Gartner, Trustpilot, BBC, ITV, and Standard Life.

Hamill often shares his thoughts on the state of UX via LinkedIn, including top things most UX professionals overlook.

“UX professionals often write cheques with their mouths, that their work can’t actually cash. I used to do this too. SEO is one of the areas where I see and hear it happening.”

He notes that all too often, UX professionals lose sight of the forest for the trees when it comes to design. They argue that improving page usability outweighs any search ranking loss. The problem is they can’t prove it and it usually isn’t true, according to Hamill.

His point is that UX and SEO exist in tandem. One doesn’t trump the other. They’re both there to boost performance. At the end of the day, it’s a matter of balance while keeping the bigger picture in focus.

What this means for UX professionals is to keep the bigger picture in mind. Sometimes you have to settle for a design you don’t 100% love in favor of preserving other established performance indicators.