What is UX and Roles in UX

Hey everyone, my name is Ritzy Williams and today we're gonna be talking about what is UX. So let's jump right into it. What is UX? UX stands for user experience. I've broken this down into 3 different definitions: general UX, company UX, and UX design. What is a general user experience?

It's, uh, I have it written down as every interaction people have.

So when you interact with something, how you interact with it is your experience. So, and you're the user. So how someone interacts with something is the definition of general user experience. Then you have company-specific UX. And to me, that's how a person interacts with anything that has a company associated with it. For example, if you buy a shoe at Nike, the entire buying purchase in this situation is the user experience. It also affects the branding, how the checkout process, all of it. And then you actually have UX design, and that is the act of designing what that experience looks like. What does it— when you go through that shopping process, is it on a website? Is there a button you press? Do you select your product? Do you change the variants? What are the steps you take and how does that look? How does it get built? How does this affect the user? How does it— does it meet their expectations and things like that? So that's the 3 different definitions I've broken it down to. Now let's look at some definitions from some of the other bigger companies.

I've got the Interaction Design Foundation, which says, "User experience, UX design, is the process design teams use to create products that provide meaningful and relevant experiences to the user. This involves the design of the entire process of acquiring and integrating the product, including aspects of branding, design, usability, and function." Adobe, I think, actually has a little extra definition to it that I kind of enjoy. But what theirs is, is we'll start by defining UX, which stands for user experience. When we say user experience, we're referring to how people interact with a product. For example, when we want to turn a light on in a room, we interact with a light switch. The design of the switch, including the color, material, and physical appearance, may impact how we feel about the interaction. Similarly, in the digital design world, UX refers to everything that affects a user's interaction with a digital product. When people use a product, they usually evaluate their experiences according to the following criteria: value— does this product give me value?

Function—

does this product work?

Usability— is it easy to use? General impressions— is it pleasant to use? And I thought both of those were really good definitions of what UX is. But hearing UX design and knowing what UX design is are two different things. When you're an actual UX designer, you have deliverables, you have tasks, you have things you actually do. Let's go into that. Now first, let's define what a UX designer is. There's actually different disciplinary actions you can do within UX design, or even different names for doing very similar work, such as product designer, interaction designer, visual designer. Those are, those are some of the other terms for UX designer. Some of them are more specific on what you're delivering and what is expected from you, while some are— those are the specializations, which are interaction design, research, and visual design. And there's some that are kind of broad. Product designer, UX designer, that really can range in what you're responsible for. And it usually is defined by the company and then the level of maturity of the UX maturity of the company will start defining what those things are too. More experienced or more mature companies will have specializations while less mature, your UX designer will be in charge or responsible for everything under the sun. And to be like, to be good at all of them is challenging because there's a different skillset. To be a good researcher, it's not the same as being a good interaction designer or being a good visual designer. To do research, you need to interact with people. You need to be able to ask open-ended questions and really dive and understand root, the root cause of certain problems and things like that. While a visual designer, you need to know color theory, you need to know spacing, you need to start knowing design systems and things that bring the visual to it. Let's go over the roles of UX design. So there's a lot of names for the roles at UX design, and depending on what you do, your specialization, you'll have different names. Sometimes companies group them all together as UX design. And as a UX designer, you're responsible for research, for creating concepts, for creating the branding, for creating the interaction, creating flows, creating the information architecture. Really, you do it all. And this is kind of a common mistake that some people do because you can actually become more specialized in knowledge and be better at, at some than others. There are different skill sets. The 3 specializations I've broken it down into is a researcher, an interaction designer, and a visual designer. A researcher is in charge of basically understanding the, the context behind what's going on, getting to the root cause, understanding the problem, understanding the users, understanding the expectations, and really just kind of providing that understanding to everyone so that they can help, uh, proceed forward. Some of these tasks, uh, tasks include user interviews, observations, shadowing users, and analytic— analytic— analytic analysis. They call it— the words that are more commonly used are qualitative and quantitative data, and you analyze them. So you can do a qualitative analysis in which you'll analyze a user interview and You might break it down into an empathy map and use affinity maps to consolidate some of that information and find like patterns and themes. And then also same for an analytical review. You may look and see interactions and see drop-off points to be able to influence the backlog based on some of the analysis done on the analytics. As an interaction designer, you work closely with the researcher to create testable concepts. You're connecting that research and a testable concept. You're, as an interaction designer, you're in charge of figuring out the information architecture. You're in charge of figuring out user flows, uh, how, how people will react to general concepts, a testable concept, in which case you'll work again with the researcher to test that concept, to find out, does it match the expected mental model of the user? Are we building what they need and how are we delivering that experience? I mean, are we just delivering what they're expected? Are we pushing it? How can we make it better? But you can also just test to find out if something's usable. Can they get through it? Can a user get through this flow? Can they get through this interaction? Can they get from point A to point B on this website? Can they complete this task? Uh, but then you can also have more conceptual testing. Is— does it meet their expectation from meeting point A and point B and provide value? Is it missing? Is it better than expected? What, what else can be, can be there? So there's levels of fidelity almost in even usability testing. So then after you have figured out your concept and you understand what's happening, you'll work with a visual designer to make sure you're using the proper patterns, add the branding. The visual designer really is delivering the high-fidelity blueprint to the developer, making sure they have the right specs, they have the, the right color scheme, the right typography, everything that keeps the consistency with the other products and the, you know, anything else that's not being designed, has that consistency with what's currently being designed. They're in charge of the UI, the user interface. And that is, you know, the visual designer's job. And those are like the main sections of UX design. A lot of companies may have special, you know, different roles. I've seen like an information architecture. I've seen a UX prototyper. I've seen different ones, but a lot of them fit into areas of those, uh, the specializations. And those are the roles of UX design. So now we've gone over what is UX design, what roles are in there. Um, in another video I'll cover some of the deliverables and show you guys what some of these things actually look like. So stay tuned, subscribe to see that, and I will talk to you guys later.