User Experience Design Belongs to Psychology
When people try to define design, we often get different explanations. It’s incorrect to say that people are confused or misunderstand, because that would assume that there is an exact definition of design. There is not an exact definition of design because it is everywhere, like engineering. However, engineering has made more successful attempts in organizing their subcomponents. Design is TBD, as John Maeda explains, and it continues to evolve quickly. Too quickly for us to pin down an accurate and complete definition.
Time and technological development tends to transform all industries, and user experience design is an area that has been drastically evolving. Within an academic and corporate setting, design falls somewhat within the realm of art — many art schools now teach design as it seems natural that design and art are more closely affiliated to each other than design and any other area. As user experience design continues to mature as a field, we as practitioners are starting to understand what it really is and what it really should be.
There are some very interesting discussions about how user experience designers should have some degree of familiarity to coding, research, machine learning, and content strategy, just to name a few. People seek unicorns that excel in all of these areas, as well as in areas of traditional design. I have not met someone who can stretch across several areas, and still perform well. That said, a user experience design becomes this strange hybrid role that can be very different from company to company even if you’re working in similar projects and roles. Some companies expect more coding, more quantitative analyses, or more print materials from their designers. So, this leads to even more confusion about what is expected of user experience designers — and what is expected of user experience design as a field.
My definition of user experience design is “the processes involved in solving or preventing user problems in a scalable and sustainable manner”. The primary concerns are the user problems, the secondary concerns are the problem-solving processes, and less importantly, the strategic implementation. If you look at the general design processes from notable sources such as Stanford d.school, you’ll find that they are all very similar and share the same key components. Solving or preventing user problems is at the heart of user experience design, which has little to do with the traditional definition of art — a form of expression.
In other words, art is not a parent of user experience design. UXD, as we often call it, is not a form of expression. It has very much become a sort of science. We try to measure as much as we can by running A/B tests and watching metric s over time. We make guesses at what kinds of changes will yield a desired outcome, and anticipate tradeoffs. This is nothing like any of the other fields of art. As UXD matures as a field, we will learn that it is closer and closer to the science of the human mind — psychology.
Not many people will see the connection because people misunderstanding psychology. They mistake it as a pseudo-science or psychiatry. Psychology is nothing like that. In fact, it’s in every way similar to what most user experience designers do. They sometimes have to code tests on the computer to experiment on people. They make hypotheses of how they can change how users behave by testing independent variables. They are familiar statistics and in quantitative analyses, so they can make good interpretations about human behavior from the numbers. They know how to brainstorm, discuss, present, and work with other researchers on their projects. In other words, psychologists make natural user experience designers.
Truthfully, I’ve been very upset at how the world of psychology has only acknowledged Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), but not UXD. UXD is a very exciting path for people who love psychology and technology. There is so much that can be done to help psychology students realize that there is so much opportunity to take what they’ve learned in school and apply it in non-academic environments. I would love to see psychology adopt UXD as a multi-disciplinary program.
Update: it’s not completely true that psychology hasn’t adopted UXD, as some larger and well-developer companies employ psychologists to assist in user experience design.
