UX Best Practices: What is UX?

The user experience (UX) refers to a users’ perspective, thoughts, and feelings using a digital product.

User Experience design (UXD or sometimes just UX) is a process of creating digital products that revolves around constantly validating assumptions through user research. Whenever you start creating a digital product, you begin with a lot of assumptions: who your users are, how they behave, what they want. The UXD process seeks to validate or invalidate those assumptions, as well as uncover hidden insights, so your team knows how to improve and evolve your digital product.

If representative users are not part of the design process, your team is not truly practicing user experience design.

UXD is sometimes confused with the user interface (UI). The UI is what the user interacts with. For example, on a website, each navigation element, the headings, copy, buttons, and images are combined to make up the UI. A successful UI is an output of the UXD process. In fact, without the foundation of UXD process, many teams find themselves chasing the latest design fads or wasting time developing features to copy their competitors.

Interested in learning more about UX? Our in-house workshops show your team how to leverage user experience research methods to get the insights you need to improve your digital product.