What the heck do UX Designers do? (ft. Bunnies)

Many people assume that UX designers exist to make things look pretty. This assumption causes much grief (for designers and non-designers).

So, what the heck do UX designers do? When I started to dig into this question, bouncing it off of other UX designers and non-designers, I discovered that there’s a ton of confusion out there. This is partly because UX design as a discipline is fairly new and constantly evolving, but also because UX designers tend to come from a range of other disciplines (sociology, business, graphic design etc.), and so naturally many of us have different specialties and approaches to solving problems.

But at the core of it all, I believe there’s a common thread. So in this post I’m going to share my personal opinion about what I believe UX designers generally care about most (and some of the approaches we might take to help us achieve our goals). I hope this is helpful to those of you who work with UX designers, and also for anyone considering transitioning into this UXD (like I did!)

I have taken the liberty of illustrating each key point with a bunny rabbit, because bunnies are adorable.

UX designers can wear many different thinking hats

Our different thinking hats can range from content strategy, to information architecture, to front end development (and beyond)!

I mention this point first because many outside the realm of UXD assume that UX designers are simply UI designers — that is, designers who live in Sketch or Photoshop and focus exclusively on the visual layout of an interface.

Though we often do do UI design, the quality and effectiveness of that design exists in direct relation to the quality of our research and thinking leading up to it. Thus, the need for so many thinking hats.

We strive towards finding the ultimate solution

UX designers don’t just want to find a good solution, or even a great solution. We want the ultimate design solution. We want something that:

• Is high-impact
• Adds real value
• Is scalable
• Lasts in the long term

We are champions for the user

You could say we care about customers – the people who purchase, use, and talk about a product. The key difference though is that we’re generally don’t view our users as customers, because we’re not focused on selling them something. Instead, we’re dedicated to building a meaningful, engaging and useful product that people actually want to engage with; something that solves a problem in their life, enhances an experience, or makes them super happy – so that we don’t have to sell it to them, they’ll seek it out.

In essence, we strive to be the voice of empathy for the humans who use, and hopefully fall in love, with our products.

We try to understand a user’s experience with a product

Our drive to better understand the user often leads us to some (or all) of the following tools or exercises:

• User personas
  These are generalized profiles that give an identity to an average user for a particular product; this can help UX designers build empathy with a target audience
• Journey mapping
  This can take many forms, but often looks like a sketch or storyboard that shows a user’s experience at different stages of (and around) the use of a product; this can help UX designers gain context, and identify pain points and opportunities for improvement
• User interviews & testing
  Though sometimes this task falls to the UX research team, many UX designers enjoy participating in user interviews and/or testing ; this can help UX designers learn more about the user’s struggles and delights when using the product or a new prototype

We are expert brainstormers

One arena that UX designers particularly kick ass in is brainstorming. It’s incredible what a good UX designer can do with post-it notes and a white-board wall. I’ve never met a group of people more adept at asking deep-diving questions, or as skilled in approaching a problem from multiple perspectives. And the tools and frameworks (like mind-mapping and design sprints) that we use to collaboratively share and develop our ideas turn out to be super useful to help other teams kick-start their problem solving process.

We use research & process to craft strategic design solutions

All of this to say, there are a lot of key steps that are part of the design process that lead up to crafting visual solutions such as wireframes and prototypes.

We rock at visualizing design solutions

Once we understand how to delight our users — we can visualize that process and share it using wireframes, UI design mock-ups (low fidelity to high-fidelity) and interactive prototypes. This usually happens with a pen and paper, and/or in programs like Sketch, Photoshop, and Illustrator.

Though not all UX designers are graphic designers, many of us have a good understanding of design principles so we can collaborate with other internal design teams like branding and patterns — to craft a consistent visual experience.

User testing is key

Testing design solutions can happen with paper prototypes or digital interactive mockups using tools such as InVision. Testing how a real-life user engages with a product is the ultimate measure of the success for a particular visual solution. Depending on the complexity of the problem, user testing might even happen at various stages throughout a project’s life cycle (and again, UX research teams might step in to help facilitate). Thorough user-testing often leads to valuable design modifications or tweaks that make the end product even better.

We do a lot of other stuff too…

Between the hours we spend crouched over UI design layouts, UX designers often also have peer-design reviews or critiques where we’ll collect feedback on a design as it progresses. These meetings happen in addition to other various stakeholder and team meetings, as increasingly UX designers seem to be intermediaries between various disciplines such as engineering, UX research, data analysis, content strategy, patterns designers etc. (I would argue that communication skills are a critical dimension to our overall craft but that’s a topic for another blog post).

And ultimately, different UX designers will have different skill-sets, specialties and preferences when it comes to UXD methodology and tools. But I believe that when it comes down to it, we all gravitate towards one common goal: to do whatever it takes to capture that golden carrot of opportunity–to find the ultimate design solution that delights our end user.