What Is User Experience Design?

Date First Published: 18th January 2023

Topic: Web Design & Development

Subtopic: Web Design

Article Type: Computer Terms & Definitions

Difficulty: Medium

Difficulty Level: 5/10

CONTENTS

Elements Of User Experience Design
Difference Between User Experience Design and User Interface Design

Learn more about what user experience design is in this article.

User experience design, also known as UX design, or UXD, is an area of web design that refers to the process of defining the experience a user would go through when interacting with a website and ensuring that the website delivers a good user experience. Even though the user experience cannot be designed because it refers to the impression of a website, UX designers can design a website that is more likely to lead to a good user experience and they are people that optimise websites for user experience.

UX design will change when receiving feedback from new users and as product and industry requirements change, the UX design may need to be updated to satisfy new needs. A person that specialises in UX design is referred to as a UX designer. UX design requires a good understanding of the user's needs, wants, behaviours, and the context that they will use a product.

Elements Of User Experience Design

Elements of user experience design include:

Usability - The extent that a website can be effectively and efficiently used by a user to achieve a goal.
Accessibility - Ensuring access to all users, regardless of disabilities and technological factors, such as the speed of their internet connection and bandwidth.
Visual design - Visual design represents the look and feel of the frontend of a user interface. The purpose of visual design is to use visual elements like colours, images, and symbols to deliver a message to its audience.
Consistency - Ensuring that the main design of webpages stays the same throughout the whole website, such as the footer, favicon, navigation bar, logo, background, context boxes, fonts, colours, labels, fonts, headings, buttons, and other elements. Two types of consistency include visual consistency and functional consistency.
Information architecture - This is about organising the information for usability and findability reasons. It is also related to metadata, which is a set of data that describes and gives information about other people.

Difference Between User Experience Design and User Interface Design

User experience (UX) design and user interface (UI) design are not the same things. UI design only focuses on the interface of a website rather than the flow between interfaces or the user’s experience. UI design works with UX design and UI and UX designers both carry out user research and measure usability. A UI designer will have a good understanding of frontend development and graphic design, whilst a UX designer will just focus on all the parts of the user experience.