What Is UX?

Aaron James
2 min readJan 14, 2021

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The beginning is the best place to start any education.

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There is a user experience for everything. Your job is not to create the experience; instead, your job is to ensure it’s good.

And what does it mean to have a good user experience? A prevalent misconception is that a great user experience is one that makes users happy.

Not true!

If happiness were the only goal, you might as well throw in some compliments and go home. However, that might not be the worst universe I could imagine, your employer might be unsatisfied with the outcome. The objective of a user experience designer is to make users effective.

A user’s experience is just the tip of the iceberg:

Photo by Long Ma on Unsplash

Many people incorrectly think that “UX” is referring to the user’s experience, but it is actually about “doing” User Experience Design. An individual’s experience of your app or site is their subjective, conscious reaction to it. Users’ feedback can be important, at times, but UX designers must do more than that.

“Doing UX”

UX Design (also sometimes referred to as UXD) involves a method very similar to doing science: you research users to understand their wants and needs, you design the ideal solution, you build and test the solution in the real world to measure its effectiveness.

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