How do you define UX?
I was asked in an interview yesterday “What do you think UX is?”. It’s an interesting question. My opinion and the interviewer’s opinions differed. I spoke about interacting with a product and seamless journeys.
I’m interested to hear how the users on this subreddit define UX.
“In the end, what a UX engineer really does is make things work”
It’s often hard to explain. I like to say, “I fight for the user,” which, pop culture reference and cuteness aside, it’s about as brief as I can get it.
A lot of it is planning, testing, refining, and reiterating that process. It’s defining what, exactly, you’re making, how best to make it, and making it work as well as possible for the user. Making the trip from start to finish as short and simple as possible while, at the same time, as functional as possible — or, at least, as is necessary.
It’s the job of a UX engineer to foresee every use case, every user type, and every possible user journey, to understand what can happen during every step, to engineer and design for what might happen, and to make sure that the user still gets what they need done done, all within the constraints of whatever system you’re working with. And as much as you’re servicing the user, you’re also sometimes controlling them, too.
In the end, what a UX engineer really does is make things work. But, in order to do that, and to make them work well (or, at least,better), we need to know and control every step of the process from ideation to implementation. And when you have the ability to take, say, an idea for an iPhone app (I focus on mobile for my work), go through the entire process of fleshing out the whole concept to the point where all that’s left is to send it to the developers to code final revisions and the UI designers to make the final screens and interface elements revisions, it seems like you’re doing most of the work. And with all of the research, testing, planning, ideation, problem-solving, etc., you often are.
This is how I look at it. My 2¢.
Originally published at www.reddit.com.
