Earlier this year, I presented at the monthly UX/UI Future Group meeting. I decided to address a popular meme among UX practitioners. Created by Erik Flowers, the meme shows how User Experience (UX) is commonly misrepresented. Unfortunately, most people think of User Experience design strictly as the visual or graphical design of user interfaces. But UX is about so much more; indeed, most of it takes place well outside the bound of graphical and visual design work. User Experience design involves all kinds of activities including user research, usability testing, information architecture, process diagrams, data collection and analysis, field research, diary studies, ethnography, participant-observation, requirements gathering, content writing, specification writing, prototyping, and more.

The UX/UI Future group, which we started back in 2007, was intended to introduce our company to the idea of user experience design – especially in terms of conventional research and design work such as user research, user testing, and other methods of user-centered design. Unfortunately, it was also part of this early tendency to conflate UI design with UX design. At the time, the approach to mix UI and UX was part of a common “guerilla UX” strategy. The idea was that, since there were no dedicated UX resources – no single individual or even designated role tasked with conventional information architecture, user research, or even interaction design — they we would have to bring UX into the organization through allied disciplines such as UI engineering, product design and management, and visual design. This type of guerilla or undercover UX was championed by folks like Cennydd Bowles and James Box in Undercover User Experience Design and later by Russ Unger and Todd Zaki Warfel who gave workshops on guerilla user research methods. Unger and Warfel eventually compiled their work into this rather nifty book, Guerrilla Ux Research Methods.

As I showed us through our architectural tour of this building, architects use design patterns to solve people’s problems – and those problems can be thoroughly social, such as dealing with corporate hiearchies of authority (or helping us avoid them). Like architecture, UX design is more about solving human problems. First, UX design must help someone accomplish a task or goal – whether the task is making a cup of tea or ordering take out with a mobile phone. UX design is also about understanding people – how they feel and think. This is especially true when it comes to human computer interaction. Unlike inert objects like tea pots, people respond to computers and software by applying the rules of social life to the interaction. This is because people can interact with computers. As such, people have an emotional response to computers that they don’t otherwise have with things like tea pots. That’s why we observe people talking to their computers, getting overly angry when the computer or software doesn’t work, and even getting inordinately pleased with or attached to these interactions.

Great UX designers such as Don Norman at Apple understood the psychology behind human computer interaction. They leveraged this human response by creating user experiences that encouraged our tendency to see computer hardware and software as animated, human-like. One example is the application of animation principles to Apple software. By using subtle animations to govern the way objects on a computer screen moved – opening, closing, minimizing – it helped the software seem even more lifelike. This is one reason why Apple products were so revolutionary at the time. They threw over square, boxy corners and designed the hardware with soft, rounded corners. The software, too, used shading and shadows to reproduce canonical and preferred lighting experiences.
User experience design isn’t reducible to user interface design, graphic design, or visual design. Instead, User Experience practitioners want to understand how people think and feel. They use practices that help them center the user throughout all phases of the product design and development life cycle. UX professionals center users in a variety of ways:

• they conduct research to understand what problems and needs people have
• they watch how people use products to see how they feel and react to using them
• they want to know if a product or process makes it easier for people to achieve their goals

When they can’t talk to users directly, the use various techniques to help us center the user such as:

• user story writing and story mapping
• writing scenarios and storyboards
• – creating research-based personas
• – conducting task analysis and cognitive walk-throughs

Resources

To learn more, check out my presentation for the UX Future Group on Slideshare: UX is not UI – Presentation, Kelley Howell