 What actually is UX design? What's a useful definition of it that you can use if you're looking for a UX design job? Or if you're trying to figure out what the hell UX design is, but it's just confusing as hell. My name is Jonathan Courtney. I hire a ton of UX designers. I am a UX designer and I'm gonna go through it all right now. You can beep out the shit. Okay, so let's just like really quickly jump into what like the official definitions of UX design are. I don't find these super helpful and I don't find them super practical. But I think it's good if you just have an idea about what like the official kind of ways of describing UX design are. So let's look here on the interaction design Foundation website which has a fairly official definition and it is that user experience design is the process of creating products that provide meaningful and relevant experiences for users. This involves the design of the entire process of acquiring and integrating the product including the aspects of branding design usability and function. Actually, that's a pretty good definition. But what it doesn't do, I guess, is you know, if you're trying to figure out how to be a UX designer, that doesn't give you like practical ways of becoming one. But that's one definition. Let's get that out of the way. Let's have a look at the other definition on uh, oh, let's maybe close that on Wikipedia for user experience design. So user experience design is the process of enhancing user satisfaction with a product by improving the usability accessibility and the pleasure provided into your interaction with the product. User experience design encompasses traditional human computer interaction design and extends it by addressing all aspects of a product or service as perceived by users. So basically UX design is everything if this is the definition you're going to go for. Now the important thing about this video and the reason I mentioned that we're going into 2019 is that things have changed a little bit. Like there's a lot of videos on YouTube. We were looking at a lot of videos on YouTube and we were like, okay, yes, these are real definitions of UX design, but they're not going to be super helpful if you're trying to get into the industry, if you're trying to become a UX designer and if you're looking to get a job in UX design or if you're watching this because you want to hire UX designers, but you really don't know how to write that job description. So I want this video to be an extremely practical look at what companies are actually looking for when they say that they're looking for UX designers because a few things have changed and one of the biggest things that have changed is that most of the biggest companies in the world have stopped looking for UX designers. Yes, they've stopped looking for UX designers and they've changed the way that they're naming this kind of thing. So what I always find really helpful is to look at some of the big Silicon Valley firms, see how they're looking for their designers because pretty much every other company in the world then copies these Silicon Valley firms after a while. So this is a great way to see like, how are these firms looking for UX designers? How are they defining UX designers? So let's have a quick look at Google. Right. So here are the design jobs at Google. The types of roles they have are UX engineer. A UX engineer synthesizes design and development, bringing Google's most innovative products, concepts to life through UX design and front-end engineering. Interesting, right? They're not even looking for a UX designer anymore. They're assuming that UX design is like a base level skill. We have visual designer. Visual designers are working on the icons, the typography, the colors, the space, all of that kind of thing. We have a motion designer with interaction designer, UX researcher and content strategist UX writer. Now one of the issues I've always had with definitions of UX design, and also when you look at YouTube videos here, is that they try to cram everything in together, right? And it's actually not really, it's very difficult to find a UX designer that does UX engineering, visual design, motion design, interaction design, UX research, content strategy, UX writing, right? It's difficult to find someone who can combine all of those things together. And I think it's a mistake to try really hard to kind of get a bit of every single thing that a UX designer can do and try to do all of them because that's quite difficult. For example, me, I probably wouldn't be the best UX researcher because it's just not something that really interests me a lot. And I'm not someone who's very focused on details. So what I am actually good at in this case is I'm good at interaction design, I would be good at being a UX engineer, I would be good at being a visual designer, but I wouldn't be a great UX researcher. So let's continue and let's have a look at some more jobs that companies are putting up. Now, something I've said a few times on our Instagram channel, you should definitely follow our Instagram channel, that's going to be somewhere here. It's maybe I can maybe, well maybe it's a link in the description, who knows. What I've said a couple of years ago was that the word UX, the job role UX design is going to change to product designer. And this is starting to happen all over Silicon Valley and it will very soon happen all over the world. If you're watching this video in 2019 or late 2018, then you've already got a head start because it's about to kick off. Now, here's a product design description for Twitter. And this is something that you're going to see a lot more of and watch out for the fact that this product designer role really takes a lot of things from UX design, right? Essentially, the way I look at it is that UX designer, the kind of UX designer who is working on products, you know, you know, making apps look better, you know, making the usability better on apps, coming up with app concepts is now going to be called a product designer in the future. Okay, or now, if it's Twitter. So let's have a look at this senior product designer role. Tweetdeck is looking for a senior product designer to join her design team, focused on building end to end design systems for web and mobile apps. Do you have lots of experience working with the latest design patterns and building upon them? They're asking you to understand design patterns, design patterns being, do you know basically how iOS works? Do you know basically how Android works? Do you know how the design systems of these operating systems work? And do you also know how design systems in specific apps work? One example of a pattern that you see a lot today is card navigation. This is something that Tinder kind of brought out and now every app uses it. Come help us make Tweetdeck incredible for millions of people that rely on our services every day. As a member of the Tweet, Twitter design team, you'll work closely with our designers, researchers and so they do separate product designers from researchers. They're completely separate roles within Twitter. And engineering is also separate as well. What you'll do, this is the important part, design and prototype and develop. The develop part is interesting there because a lot of companies don't ask you to develop the things that you're designing. So that's also something that's unique in this case to this job description. So design, prototype and develop elegant solutions for web and mobile apps. So you need to really know how to design web and mobile apps. It means that you're going to need to know how to use programs like Figma. It means you're going to need to understand how apps look and feel generally so you don't create complete sh**. So let's think about that in terms of if you are to be a product designer working at Twitter, you are going to need to be the type of person who knows how to design app screens. Okay, so that's like already a super basic obvious thing that needs to come out of this for mobile and for web. So you're going to need to know like what the limitations for both of those platforms are. Number two, identify user needs, sketch solutions with prototype, test ideas with our user research team and refine designs with data on user feedback. This is a great sentence because it encompasses everything that I really understand about UX design as to be the real UX design. And this is you can take the data from the research team, the user needs, right, the data, like whatever they dump on you, whether that's a PDF or whether it's a meeting, whether it's you watching the user tests, you can take that, you can come up with solutions, you can literally draw out solutions. Maybe we'll pop up some overlays here of how we do that at AJ and Smart, you know, drawing out the concept, something like that. Then you're able to turn those solutions into prototypes, into digital prototypes within Figma or something like that clickable prototypes. And then you're able to test those with users and take that feedback and turn it into something that you can actually now iterate on. And that's really for me, this bullet point, this is the key of what you need to be able to do if you want to be a UX designer, if you want to be a product designer in 2019, these are the things this this real bullet point here, we're going to link to these job pages, by the way, so you can have a look at them. But I really feel like it's much better to look at these job pages than to look at definitions online about what you should learn, because those definitions are sort of, I would say old school and sometimes out of touch or too general. Whereas here I'm figuring out here's exactly what Twitter expects me to do if I want to work there. So now I know what sort of things to search. Now I know the types of things that I'm going to need to understand. Let's have a look at the next thing. Document detailed interaction models and UI specifications. That sounds scary. But to be honest, every company has their own way of doing that. When you get in the door, they'll show you how they do it. And then you'll have to learn how to do it. That could literally be taking screenshots and then sticking them into Google Docs or it could be anything. So that's not something that's specific to UX design. Iterate alongside engineers. This is something like basically, you know, you're going to be sitting with engineers or working with engineers to make sure that you're constantly iterating on the product. Collaborate with other designers to maintain design consistency. All right, you know, pretty general evangelize UX, best UI practices to other designers. So this is basically telling you that you need to stay up to date on what's happening in the whole design industry. And look here, we're talking about UX was not mentioned once in this entire section. They do mention UI, but this is essentially a UX designer job description. There's nothing really different here to UX designer job description. The requirements are a little bit general here, except for the first one, expert at designing and building products for desktop and mobile experiences. My assumption here is that we're talking about the design part of it and not necessarily being an expert at the development part of it, strong communication and collaboration skills, real passion for identifying and solving user problems, comfort and fast based, highly dynamic environments. You have to love Twitter as well at the end here. So if you don't love Twitter, you get out. Okay. So that for me is a great, great job description of what a UX designer is, what a product designer is when we're going into 2019, going to 2020. And this is the kind of thing you're going to see a lot more. So it's getting a little bit more, it's not getting more general, it's not getting more specific, but it is talking more specifically about products rather than UX as something that can be everything, right? It's like a lot of people, I look at the comments in other UX design videos and people are like, yeah, well, you know, it's not just about digital products, it's about services, it's about physical products, it's about blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yes, you're correct. If you want to go for the general definition of UX, yes, it is everything, you're correct. But today, in the types of videos that you're watching on YouTube, and at the types of companies UX designers usually want to work at, we are mostly talking about digital products. And especially our channel, we're really talking about digital products, we're not talking about how to make this a better, you know, ergonomic, whatever, we are talking about digital products. Let's have a quick look at Facebook's job page here. So product designer, again, this gives me a very good hint that product designer is going to be like the key job, like this is the thing that people are going to be looking for. So product designer and it's in the category design and user experience. Interesting, interesting. So product designer is the specific job name. And you can see on the right here, they've got a few other ones, UX researchers, something that they break out separately to product designer, a prototyper, very interesting, because it's super, super specific. This is for the Oculus team. But let's look at the product designer thing here, and I'm going to skip forward a little bit and not read everything. That's not important. As a product designer, you'll be involved in every aspect of the product development process, from brainstorming, the next great product and innovate and innovation to tweaking pixels right before the launch. You'll be expected to utilize your full range of product design interaction and visual design skills. And you'll own the experience for a wide area of the Facebook product. This position is full time and based in New York. That's the important part. So what are your responsibilities? I think this is really well written as well, by the way, to be honest. Let's have a look at the responsibilities. Take a broad concept, turn them into something useful and valuable. Okay, whatever, design flows and experience that are incredibly simple and elegant. I mean, essentially what you're doing there is creating prototypes and you're designing the flows for those things contribute to high level strategic decisions with the rest of the product and executive teams. This is a tricky one. This is definitely this is senior position, right? Oh, it doesn't say it interesting. Because contributing to high level strategic decisions with the rest of the product and executive team is often something that UX designers don't have. They don't have this strategic thinking. We're definitely going to make videos around how to get the into that mindset. But it's not something for right now. Given solicit feedback from other designers, okay, it's similar. It's really similar to the Twitter one. There's almost no difference. Here we go. We have UX mentioned once demonstrate experience with intent. So hybrid of UX and UI. And that's something really to think about with this product designer role. It is sort of a hybrid role. It is bringing together UX and UI skills. And it's sort of the UX researcher role that's popping up in all of these websites is essentially taking this like user persona and user research part out of the UX role, putting it somewhere else and saying, okay, but you're the product designer now. So that's what I would say the difference is. This is interesting. You only need to got two years of experience. This is great. I want to work there. So I'm just going to apply for a job right now and you guys can you guys can wait. I wanted to look at just really quickly look at some more traditional UX ads, because these are obviously the big Silicon Valley giants. Like I said, these set the standard for the rest of the industry. I can promise you that every other company will be looking for product designers maybe in one or two years once they start because they just copy what the Facebook's and what the Google's and what the Twitter's do. Okay, so let's have a look at like if we look for, you know, just UX designer, generic and have a search and look around UX designer at Anglian water services limited salary, whatever exciting. Let's have a look. What will you be doing? This is always the interesting part. This is what I want to look at. So now here's a little bit of the trend in play. They're saying as our new UI UX designer, they should be they'll be using the word product designer fairly soon, you'll be responsible for designing and creating user focused engaging and accessible user experience with consistent brand guidelines creating. So here's an interesting thing. They are actually combining the user researcher and the UX designer. And that's something that's Facebook and Twitter are separating out. So it's interesting for me to see here that the creating personas and user experience and maps across multiple brands. Now, this is something that I actually don't think is a great part of this ad because it is now taking UX UI and research and jamming them all together, which is what Facebook and Twitter were not doing. They're keeping those roles separate because they know their separate roles. So here's when I said a little bit more old school, here's a company that sort of wants someone who can do everything. And that's not a problem. I mean, I was one of those designers who was doing everything. But I just want to say that for the point I'm trying to make over the next few years, for the types of jobs you'll be looking at, I do see these as being separate. I do see the research part. Of course, I need to know the research part, how it works as a designer as a product designer. But I don't think that it's something that I need to be doing on a day to day basis. Conducting usability tests. Once again, I feel like that's a research UX researcher role work with stakeholders to create design concepts. Yes, sure. Lead onsite design enhancements. Okay, prototype the website to understand. Okay, all the same, all the same advice on search engine optimization and implement enhancements based on this definitely not UX and UI design. So that's something that that's a very like this is just like we need someone to come in and do the internet for us. By the way, Anglian water services, I'm not attacking you. I just I'm making this video so people understand what UX design is. And this would be something that I would say it is not this is a different job. This is a person working in SEO. What do you need? Okay, so I'm just going to skip through these. That's not interesting. Let's have a look at another one. What's what do we expect? Okay, there's there's basically no information here. We're looking for this is a UX designer for a high growth startup. We're looking for UX designers with the ambition of owning and running a startup in a beautiful part of the UK partnered with software engineers. All right, it's not very descriptive UX designer for Okay, that's the same one journey UX designer a typical day in a typical day you can expect to share designs and ideas collaborate with other you know what like these job ads I by the way I suck at writing job ads but these job ads are really not very great. Except for this part here collaborate with other members of UX and D I guess that's the name of what they call their team within that company and BBC this is a BBC job ad by the way to get to the heart of what our users needs creating sketches concepts user journeys wireframes and navigational prototypes. Okay, so that does explain pretty much what this job will be. And there's a few other kind of broader things in there which are maybe not super interesting. But there you go. I think that my goal with this video was to show you what the kinds of companies that are going to be hiring UX designers over the next few years are actually looking for instead of just saying well UX design is this and you need to read the design of everyday things of course like this there are one million videos we're going to make more videos about like going deeper into what UX design is as well but what is UX design today what UX design is really defined by what these companies are actually looking for it's not what the academic definition is it's what these companies are looking for and what I see coming up over the next few years is that product designer UX designer is going to be split up into product designer and UX researcher they're going to be separate things and the product designer is essentially going to be expected to know how to build all things product related however I would say that the engineering part is going to pop out as well and product designers and most companies are not expected to be able to you know actually do the development or anything like that. So yeah my recommendation if you are looking to find out what UX design is and you're kind of trawling the internet and you're a little bit confused about it go to these job sites and read how these companies define it because it's the market that defines what the jobs are it's not the academic design people who are defining what the jobs are great that we have these definitions here on the interactive interaction design foundation great that we know what user experience design is great that there's a million courses out there that are probably horribly out of date but what UX design is is what the market decides what UX design is and the market is currently deciding that UX design is product design and research is starting to move away from it and become its own thing because it's being taken more seriously. What other questions do you have around UX design did you find it useful that we went through these job ads I hope you enjoyed this video if you did and if you want more stuff like it hit the like button hit the subscribe button and you'll see more videos thanks so much for your time and have a great one bye