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UX Design: UX in one sentence
The entirety of UX theory distilled into one, powerful sentence that you can use to guide your organization’s design activities.
Overview
Over the years, UX has become a complicated, obfuscated, tangled mess of artifacts, practices, theories, and principles.
Today, I want to share with you the entirety of UX theory distilled into one, powerful sentence that you can use to guide your organization’s design activities.
UX in one sentence
I already wrote about this at length in The UX Designer’s Field Manual, but I wanted to make sure you had a really solid, simple, and clear understanding of what UX truly is:
“UX is the gap between a user’s expectations and their real outcomes.”
That’s it.
UX is the gap between a user’s expectations and their real outcomes. How they think something is going to go down, or how they expect things to go, versus how they actually go, what they actually get, and how they actually feel at the end of the process.
This idea is not altogether novel, but it is powerful, and can help you quickly cut through the noise of modern UX shenanigans.
What creates good UX?
So if UX is the gap between a user’s expectations and their real outcomes, how do we design a high-quality, high-impact user experience?
Simple:
“Exceed expectations.”
Establish baselines expectations, how a user expects to feel, what they expect to do, and how difficult they expect a process to be, and then exceed those expectations in every possible way.
- If they expect to do X, help them do XY AND Z.
- If they expect to feel A, help them feel A+.
- If they expect it to take an hour, help them get it done in 10 minute.
