Glossary
UX Design
What is UX design?
User experience (UX) design concerns how people experience a product or service. It involves understanding their goals and circumstances, developing possible solutions, and examining how those solutions work in use.
UX is broader than the interface
Norman and Nielsen's definition includes the person's relationship with the company, its products, and its services. A clear booking screen cannot make an unavailable appointment suitable for someone's needs. The underlying service and support also shape the experience.
What UX design includes
User research
Interviews, observation, and other methods help investigate what people need, what they do, and where they struggle.
Information architecture
Organizing content and features helps people understand where to go. Sitemaps and related diagrams can make that structure explicit.
Interaction design
Define how actions, controls, feedback, and recovery work together. What happens after a click, and what happens if something goes wrong?
Visual design
Typography, color, layout, and imagery affect what people notice and how they interpret the interface. Visual quality is part of the experience, alongside function.
Prototyping and usability testing
Represent proposed designs and examine people trying to use them. Use what happens to revise the design.
Accessibility
Consider who can use the product and under what conditions, including people with disabilities. Evaluate the actual design with these needs in mind.
Principles in practice
Clarity helps people understand the available actions. Consistency can make patterns easier to learn. Feedback helps explain what an action did. Flexibility allows for different needs and circumstances. These design aims need to be assessed in context.
UX design and behavioral design
Both examine what people do in a particular setting. A UX project might investigate why people cannot complete a booking; a behavioral design project might focus on what would help them book at all. The questions overlap, but a clear interface alone does not establish that people want or can use the underlying service.
Why it matters
UX design connects what a service offers with what people need and can do. Completing design activities is not the same as producing a useful experience. Check the result with the relevant users and tasks.