5 Standard Definitions of UX that will help you explain UX Designer’s Job.
“Ever seen that look on the face of a lady?”
It’s a beautiful morning. I am heading to my office while reading a book in an Uber. This lady sitting beside me, my co-rider, mumbled something!
Lady: Hey! What are you reading?
Me: Hi! This is an entrepreneurial book “Rework” by Jason Fried, the founder of Basecamp and Ruby on rails.
pause…
Lady: What do you do?
Me: I’m a UX Designer!
Lady: What? (curious face) What is UX Design?
Now, this is the question that makes my heart beat fast and makes my throat go dry. You may ask, why?
Because the answer to this question in not something which is universally accepted. It keeps changing with each individual, each organization and each book.
We all have our own definitions of UX Design and we all try our best to make the other person understand a part of our identity. Unfortunately, there’s this ever-increasing dilemma and ambiguity around the term UX and all we need for the time being is a clear definition of UX.
What Is UX Design?
Here’s an attempt to remove the ambiguities, bringing together the 5 widely used definitions of UX Design that could make your life easy without making you wonder what to say next to your co-rider.
1. NN/g (Nielson Norman Group)
“User experience” encompasses all aspects of the end user’s interaction with the company, its services, and its products.
The first requirement for exemplary user experience is to meet the exact needs of the customer, without fuss or bother. Next come simplicity and elegance that produce products that are a joy to own, a joy to use.
True user experience goes far beyond giving customers what they say they want or providing checklist features. In order to achieve high-quality user experience in a company’s offerings, there must be a seamless merging of the services of multiple disciplines, including engineering, marketing, graphical and industrial design, and interface design.
2. Wikipedia
User eXperience (UX) is about how a person feels about using a system.
User experience highlights the experiential, effective, meaningful and valuable aspects of human-computer interaction (HCI) and product ownership, but it also covers a person’s perceptions of the practical aspects such as utility, ease of use and efficiency of the system.
User experience is subjective in nature, because it is about an individual’s performance, feelings and thoughts about the system. User experience is dynamic because it changes over time as the circumstances change
3. UXmatters
It encompasses all aspects of a digital product that users experience directly and perceive, learn, and use including its form, behavior, and content.
Learn-ability, usability, usefulness, and aesthetic appeal are key factors in users’ experience of a product.
4. Usabilityfirst.com
The user experience, mostly called “customer experience” when referring to e-commerce websites; the totality of the experience of a user when visiting a website.
Their impressions and feelings. Whether they’re successful. Whether they enjoy themselves. Whether they feel like coming back again. The extent to which they encounter problems, confusions, and bugs.
5. Hekkert
The entire set of effects that are elicited by the interaction between a user and a product. Aesthetic, emotional and experience.
It includes the degree to which all our senses are gratified (aesthetic experience), the meaning we attach to the product (experience of the meaning), and the feelings and emotions that are elicited (emotional experience).
This, by no means, is an exhaustive list of the different definitions we encounter in our day to day lives for the term UX. We all are growing and along with us, our identity is manifesting itself into various words and forms.
As I mentioned earlier, we all have our own definitions for the term UX and sometimes that is the best set of words that could be told to our co-riders in the clearest language such that it satisfies the contextual need and we can peacefully head back to what we were doing.
Well! I was reading a book :)
