User Experience Design (UX) was coined by Don Norman (or at least it’s credited to him) when he was working for Apple in the 90s. His position at Apple was the first to include “user experience” in the job title (which is probably why he often gets credit for naming the great umbrella field).

Anyways, UX encompasses a massive variety of fields from design to business strategy to engineering. The User Experience Team of One by Leah Buley breaks it down this way:

Interaction Design or Information Architecture: Essentially the design of the structure of an application, piece of software, or product.

Visual Design: The visual elements in the application/product (typography, color palette, etc.).

User Research: Qualitative and quantitative research on end-users and major stakeholders.

Content Strategy or Copy Writing: The role of content across the entire product (messages, tone, language, etc.).

If you’re like me and studied HCI (human-computer interaction) in school then you probably know about most or all of the roles described above. If not, you may want to check out this blog post from Creative Market that lists their top 10 must-read UX books (I especially recommend Don’t Make Me Think: Revisited).

The greatest thing about UX is that so many people use it and don’t realize it. For example, Product Managers (though I’m going to guess that most of them don’t define themselves as UX users) are often heavily involved in user experience and make decisions based upon benefits to the end-user and the major stakeholders (i.e. their bosses). My boss right now is a Project Manager and she constantly claims to know nothing about usability yet she has all this implicit knowledge on the subject that comes out naturally when I discuss website redesign suggestions with her.

Because we’re all users, we all have some knowledge of what goes into UX work. We know what we want from the products we use, even if we don’t realize it. Take Google+ for example (just kidding, no one uses that). Err… let’s look at Facebook then. When you open the Facebook app, you’re taken directly to a page that allows you to post instantly or scroll forever through endless cat videos and political rants (that 2016 election though). If Facebook had the app launch on your profile page, you would constantly have to click yourself over to your news feed to use the app the way that most people do. But hey, if you like to browse your own profile page every day, I’m not judging.

The problem that users who haven’t studied design or UX or HCI or Cognitive Science often have is that they can’t often identify (at least not consciously) what elements make a design great. That’s because of one simple problem: truly great designs are invisible.

Why? If something is designed well enough to provide the user with full or nearly-full immersion, they don’t notice the design because they are so wrapped up in the experience.

Humans are pretty good at adapting to less than intuitive designs though. Consider the car. When you first started driving, there were thousands of things you had to think about: what pedal is for brakes, how to turn on the headlights, which way to push the lever for a left turn signal. Pretty quickly though, you learned the design and stopped having to think about whether up was for a left or right turn signal. (I’m still waiting for my self-driving car, Google)

In any case, I’ve gotten a little bit off track from the original question. If I got something blatantly wrong please leave a comment so I can fix my mistakes. And if you know more than me on this subject, leave me a comment so I can learn from a master.

-Ashlee “not a perfect user” Palka