User Experience Designer (UX Designer)

The term user experience designer, UX designer, user experience architect, user experience consultant are all used to describe pretty much the same thing. Often it's just a question of who you speak to or what company you are working with.

Having said that, the term User Experience designer is sometimes used as an all encompassing role title (as in fact is Information Architect, but increasingly less so now), incorporating all aspects of user focused design considerations including information architecture, user centred design, user testing, interaction design, and even aspects of visual design.

One subtle, possibly growing difference, (we'll see over the coming months/years) is that a UX designer (as opposed to an information architect) may suggest to some a more creative outlook in terms of visual design considerations and incorporation of both documented and less defined aspects of a given company's brand.

So to some, a user experience designer differs from an IA in that the practitioner has an added focus on a creatively lead brand experience as opposed to an approach based solely on solid usability principles and the organisation of information.

Conflicts between creative and usability view points are well known to UX designers and so there is likely to be growing pains as some organisations seek to apply more and more of a creative/visual aspect to UX design.

It's very important to note that the term 'creative' needs to be handled with care in this sense as it's my firm belief that the best (and still quite rare) user experience design allows for the combination of impactful creative presentation of information in a way that preserves and optimises usability. Combining these 2 sometimes competing disciplines (along with the overarching principle of 'usefulness') is in my view an act of high level creativity, often resulting in world class design solutions.

What Is User Experience?

User experience (abbreviated as UX) is how a person feels when interfacing with a system. The system could be a website, a web application or desktop software and, in modern contexts, is generally denoted by some form of human-computer interaction (HCI).

Those who work on UX (called UX designers) study and evaluate how users feel about a system, looking at such things as ease of use, perception of the value of the system, utility, efficiency in performing tasks and so forth.

UX designers also look at sub-systems and processes within a system. For example, they might study the checkout process of an e-commerce website to see whether users find the process of buying products from the website easy and pleasant. They could delve deeper by studying components of the sub-system, such as seeing how efficient and pleasant is the experience of users filling out input fields in a Web form.