 Welcome to What is User Experience Design? This learning activity introduces you to what User Experience Design is and how it improves product development. What is User Experience Design? Unlike traditional design, User Experience Design combines functionality with usability. User Experience Designers always take the end user into consideration. So products designed by user experience designers are typically easier to use. While you may have heard the terms User Experience Design or designing for the user, you may not have really understood what these terms mean. User Experience Design is more than just creating a product or application. It's about understanding your users and designing a product for them that is not only usable, but also gives them a great experience. Using User Experience Design is great, but what does it mean in terms of practical applications? Let's say your company spends millions of dollars creating the absolute best widget on the planet. This widget can do anything and everything any widget owner has ever wanted. But when the new widget hits the market, no one buys it. Your customer's feedback starts rolling in and you learn that your users don't know how to use the new widget because the design is confusing and it's clumsy to hold. How did that happen? Why was the greatest widget ever unsuccessful? The widget failed because it wasn't designed with user in mind. Traditional product designers spend hours creating what they feel are the perfect products, applications or websites. These projects become the designers' babies. The designers love their babies. The families are proud of their babies and their friends are convinced to love their babies. When traditional designers finally share their babies with others and start hearing negative feedback, they struggle to accept that their creations aren't perfect. They may also be biased against any criticisms and suggestions for improvement. They can have a hard time understanding why others don't love their babies and resist making any changes to their original designs. So, how can this situation be avoided? By employing User Experience Design or UXD. With UXD, you're designing for the user and not for your own preferences and needs. As a UX designer, it's your job to look at the entire experience holistically and make sure that the user's needs are always met. UX designers must be advocates for the user. Your goal is to provide balance between the client's needs and the user's needs. So, how do you always incorporate the user's needs into the design? The UX designer includes user's needs from the very beginning of the project. Let's revisit the widget. The first step in making the widget user friendly is for the UX designer to observe potential customers using similar products and going about their daily lives. So, the UX designers find users that could potentially use the widget or are using a competitor's widget. Then, the UX designer performs either or both non-participatory or participatory observations. After the UX designers gather information from their observations, use the information to generate personas. A persona is a written illustration of a fictional character who is a representation of one type of user. These personas help UX designers understand who they're designing their widgets for. Although the personas are fictional, the information used to create them is not. Once the UX designers have information from the client and the personas, they can begin creating the prototype. UX designers create many different prototypes. Depending on the timeframe and budget, UX designers draw sketches to develop fully functioning applications. These prototypes are then used for testing. Testing is the most important part of UXD. There are two types of testing, usability and user experience. Usability tests ask the users to complete specific tasks to ensure the widget is functional. User experience testing, well, test the user's experience while using the widget. Both types of tests need to happen many times during the development phase of any product. To ensure your widget is usable and provides a great experience for your users, based on the UX testing results. The UX designer and the client can go back to their original designs and make changes to the widget to improve usability and user experience. You have completed what is user experience design.