UX, or user experience, is about ensuring that the customer’s journey is as frictionless and easy as possible. UX focuses primarily on the functionality of design.
Let’s look at the hypothetical example of Maggie who needs to hire a senior caregiver for her elderly mom, Juanita, who has diabetes. Maggie goes to a website that has a compilation of profiles of senior caregivers all over the U.S. She needs to narrow down her search to find caregivers near Juanita, and she also wants to find only experienced caregivers who are knowledgeable about diabetes management.
But Maggie quickly gets frustrated because she cannot easily find the search tools that would allow her to narrow down the list of available caregivers according to their location, experience and areas of expertise. She ends up going to a different website instead because the first one was too difficult to use.
Clearly, the owners of the first website did not hire a UX designer. If a UX designer had worked on that website, they would have ensured that it was easy for users to find what they needed quickly and without getting frustrated.
UX design seems like a relatively new phenomenon, developed specifically for websites and apps. However, the concept of user experience actually predates the computer era, although the concept wasn’t given a specific name until 1995 by Don Norman.1
Don Norman was a cognitive scientist who joined Apple in the early 90s. He coined his own job title — User Experience Architect.1 In his view, this term encompassed every aspect of a user’s experience with a particular system. The user experience includes the product itself, the interface, industrial design, graphics, physical interactions and even the user manual.
At Apple, the philosophy is that UX guides a customer along the buying journey not just with a streamlined, easy-to-use website, but also with highly functional Apple stores.2 Every part of the buyer journey is important. In other words, UX design isn’t purely a digital skill, although UX designers do focus primarily on websites and apps.
