What’s UX Design?

The more I tell new friends what I do, the more I hear, “What’s UX Design?”

I recognize this practice is in the toddler stage of the tech industry compared to other practices that have been there since the dawn of the computer and the Nokia and I like to give the simplest answers if I can.

The conversation goes a little like this:

I tell people I make the skeleton of apps and/or websites. Then I often hear, “Oh, so you make websites.” Not exactly, I’m in the middle of the back end developers and the front end UI designers who work on fonts and color schemes like a technology sandwich. UX works on navigation, getting someone from A to B and finding out if there are any hidden struggles or missed opportunities we can make better for the users along the way. If someone hires us and we find that customers struggle to make purchases on a website our client makes money off of, we can then design and solve the problem in order to get our customers to the check out with as few issues as possible. Not to mention the revenue increases for the business owner so in the end everybody wins.

Most people have an “Ooo” face after this as if a light bulb switched on. It’s such a young practice for a career people never knew existed, yet impacts their everyday technology use. Personally, that’s how I felt when I started studying UX Design. I used it all the time and took it for granted.

It’s almost a sigh of relief when people do know what a UX designer is. And if not, this is my latest and most worn out spiel on what a designer does in order to explain it to anyone who is new to this. The skeleton part seems to bring the most clarity when talking about creating an app or web flow so far.