What is user experience?
User experience is everything that happens between a person and a product, judged from the person's side. It includes whether they can find what they want, how long it takes, how many times they have to stop and think, whether the product behaved as they expected and how they felt when they finished. The term was popularized by Don Norman, who took the title of user experience architect at Apple in the early 1990s because he felt usability and interface were too narrow to describe what mattered.
UX is both a quality and a discipline. As a quality, every product has a user experience, good or bad, whether anyone designed it or not. As a discipline, UX design is the practice of shaping that experience on purpose, through research, structure, content, interaction and testing.
Why it matters
Why user experience matters
People do not separate a brand from the experience of dealing with it. A slow page, a form that loses what they typed, a checkout that demands an account, a menu that hides the thing they came for: each is remembered as the brand being difficult. Good UX turns into business results directly, in conversions, repeat visits and lower support costs, and indirectly, in reputation and word of mouth. Search engines measure parts of it too, from page speed and visual stability to whether visitors find what they searched for, and they favor pages that serve people well.
In practice
How user experience works in practice
- 01
UX work begins with understanding: who the users are, what they are trying to do and where the current experience fails them, found through interviews, analytics, heatmaps and watching real people use the product. That understanding shapes the structure, the content and the flows, which are prototyped and tested before they are built.
- 02
After launch it continues as measurement and refinement. We look at where people drop out, what they search for and fail to find, which pages they leave quickly and what customer service hears most often, then fix the biggest problems first. UX is never only the designer's job: copywriters, developers, customer service and anyone who decides what goes on a page are shaping it too.
At RIOT
User experience at RIOT
This glossary is a small piece of UX we designed ourselves on riot.nyc, a WordPress site we design and build. Each entry answers the question first, in one sentence, then explains it, then lists the mistakes and the questions people actually ask, in the same order every time. A reader who arrives from a search gets the answer in seconds and can leave satisfied, or stay and read on.
Watch out
What people get wrong about user experience
Treating UX as a layer of polish added at the end, when most of it is decided by what the product does and how it is structured. Second, designing for the team's own preferences and calling it intuition. Third, confusing a good-looking product with a good experience. A beautiful site that takes six seconds to load on a phone, or a stylish form with no clear error messages, is a bad experience with excellent typography.
