User experience design is a subset of the field of experience design which pertains to the creation of the architecture and interaction models which impact a user's perception of a device or system. The scope of the field is directed at affecting 'all aspects of the user’s interaction with the product: how it is perceived, learned, and used.'
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What Is User Experience Design
User experience design can sometimes be a slippery term. With all the other often used terms that float around in its realm in the technology and web space: interaction design, information architecture, human computer interaction, human factors engineering, usability, and user interface design. People often end up asking “what is the difference between all these fields and which one do I need?” This article examines the term and field of user experience to plainly extrapolate its meaning and connect the dots with these other fields.
Paluch, Kimmy. Montparnas (2006). Articles>User Experience>User Centered Design
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User experience design is a subset of the field of experience design which pertains to the creation of the architecture and interaction models which impact a user's perception of a device or system. The scope of the field is directed at affecting "all aspects of the user’s interaction with the product: how it is perceived, learned, and used." User experience design, most often abbreviated UX, but sometimes UE, is a term used to describe the overarching experience a person has as a result of their interactions with a particular product or service, its delivery, and related artifacts, according to their design.
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Usability and the User Experience
What’s the difference between usability and user experience? For me, user experience is the experience someone has when using a design. Usability is the extent to which the design provides a good user experience. Usability is often misunderstood to mean ‘ease of use’. It’s much more than this though.
Hamill, David. Good Usability (2009). Articles>Usability>User Experience
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Ten Most Common Misconceptions About User Experience Design
The term “user experience” or UX has been getting a lot of play, but many businesses are confused about what it actually is and how crucial it is to their success. I asked some of the most influential and widely respected practitioners in UX what they consider to be the biggest misperceptions of what we do. The result is a top 10 list to debunk the myths.
Hess, Whitney. Mashable (2009). Articles>User Experience>User Centered Design
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At some point in your career, you’ll be called upon to sell UX to someone in your organization. You’ve probably already done it. Perhaps you’ll need to justify what you do in an organization or industry that’s just beginning to adopt UX methods or sell UX to secure your position within an organization or get future projects. So, what do you need to know to help you sell UX? What challenges might you face? This article examines what works and what does not work well when selling UX within an organization, identifies barriers you might encounter to the adoption of UX methods in your organization, and discusses how to package and present UX to stakeholders.
Szuc, Daniel, Paul J. Sherman and John S. Rhodes. UXmatters (2008). Articles>User Experience>Workplace
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Evangelizing UX Across An Entire Organization
Executive buy-in is important, but communicating and selling the UX message across the organization, at all levels, is just as important. I would be most interested in learning more about the corporate cultures that embrace UX or customer-centered thinking and understanding more about why they have and what makes them ripe. What worked in the organizations you’ve worked for? What caused frustrations? It seems when everyone is trying to improve the user experience, it can help empower a usability / UX / design team to work on more strategic initiatives instead of facing roadblocks along the way.
Six, Janet M. UXmatters (2009). Articles>User Experience>Workplace
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One of the key objectives of user research is to identify themes or threads that are common across participants. These patterns help us to turn our data into insights about the underlying forces at work, influencing user behavior. Patterns demonstrate a recurring theme, with data or objects appearing in a predictable manner. Seeing a visual representation of the data is usually enough for us to recognize a pattern. However, it is much harder to see patterns in raw data, so identifying patterns can be a daunting task when we face large volumes of research data. Patterns stand out above the typical noise we’re used to seeing in nature or in raw data.
Baty, Steve. UXmatters (2009). Articles>Research>User Experience
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The Dynamic Discourse of Visual Literacy in Experience Design 
Educators should include new dimensions of visual literacy in academic curricula. Today’s students are actively involved in interactive experiences. They are contributing content to websites as well as designing websites and other types of online experiences for the public. Students need to understand the semiotics of interactive computing and how the integration of diverse sensory data with social interaction impacts the way we interpret online information.
Search, Patricia. TechTrends (2009). Articles>Education>Visual Rhetoric>User Experience
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User Experience Designer or ...? What You Call Yourself Matters
Using a self-designation with a certain amount of specificity sacrifices practicality to accuracy. Individuals who have been hired as a single-function specialist may have the luxury of presenting as a “usability engineer” or “information architect”. For the independent consultant, this strategy can have definite negative consequences.
Bailie, Rahel Anne. Intentional Design Inc. (2009). Careers>Usability>User Experience>Information Design
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Empathy is what separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. We have an ability to imagine things the way that others see them and how it makes them feel. We don’t even have to have a disability ourselves. Accessibility is NOT a checklist. Accessibility is about usability. Accessibility is a paradigm shift. Accessibility is a personal issue.
Foster, Rob. northtemple (2009). Articles>Accessibility>User Centered Design>User Experience
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The User Experience of Enterprise Software Matters: Part 1
There’s one area that I believe user experience has lagged behind: the enterprise software space. I can’t tell you how many frustratingly unusable enterprise Web applications I’ve encountered during my 12 plus years in corporate America. As important as the user experience of enterprise software is to a business’s success, why isn’t its assessment usually a factor in technology selection?
Sherman, Paul J. UXmatters (2008). Articles>Web Design>Content Management>User Experience
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The User Experience of Enterprise Software Matters, Part 2: Strategic User Experience
In this column, I’ll provide a technology selection framework that can help enterprises better assess the usability and appropriateness of enterprise applications they’re considering purchasing, with the goal of ensuring their IT (Information Technology) investments deliver fully on their value propositions.
Sherman, Paul J. UXmatters (2009). Articles>Web Design>Content Management>User Experience
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Including Recommendations in User Interfaces to Enhance Motivation
Motivation is an important factor in any kind of online interaction or transaction. People need a little encouragement when they’re not really convinced they should take any action or are uncertain about what action to take next. As users perform tasks online, they need to understand what’s happening and expect you to help them move forward. This article discusses the responsibility of a user interface to provide recommendations along a user’s path of interaction.
Kirmani, Afshan. UXmatters (2009). Articles>User Interface>Help>User Experience
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Are URL Shorteners A Necessary Evil, Or Just Evil?
What started out as something people did via e-mail and bookmark-sharing services like Delicious, is now moving to Facebook, Twitter, and other social broadcasting services. It is just so much more efficient to share a link once with all your friends and followers than to send it to each one individually.
Schonfeld, Erick. TechCrunch (2009). Articles>Web Design>User Experience>Social Networking
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Turning User Experiences into Learning Experiences 
Savita Taylor talks about her journey from textile engineering to technical communication and beyond.
Taylor, Savita A. Intercom (2009). Careers>TC>User Experience>Education
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The role of the information architect (IA), interaction designer, or user experience (UX) designer is to help create architecture and interactions which will impact the user in constructive, meaningful ways. Sometimes the design choices are strategic and affect a broad interaction environment; other times they may be tactical and detailed, affecting few. But sometimes the design choices we make are not good enough for the users we’re trying to reach. Often a sense of democratic responsibility is missing in the artifacts and experiences which result from our designs and decisions.
Owen, Jamie. Boxes and Arrows (2009). Articles>Information Design>User Experience>Participatory Design
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Bringing Holistic Awareness to Your Design
All of the members of the best teams could tell us, with relative ease, the top five business goals of their application, the top five user types the application was to serve, and the top five platform capabilities and limitations they had to work within. And, when questioned more deeply, each team member revealed an appreciation and understanding of the challenges and goals of their teammates almost as well as their own.
Selbie, Joseph. Boxes and Arrows (2009). Design>User Experience>Usability>User Centered Design
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Using Web Software for Collaborative Work on Virtual UX Teams
Increasingly, virtual teamwork means UX professionals must get things done in an environment devoid of the physical presence of colleagues and lacking the relative ease of on-site collaboration. Effectively completing UX tasks while at a distance from our clients, stakeholders, and team members can be challenging, from both technical and process perspectives. How can we, as UX professionals, enable the close collaboration with others we need and manage the process of creating engaging digital experiences when we’re so far apart from each other physically?
Follett, Jonathan. UXmatters (2009). Articles>Collaboration>Software>User Experience
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Refactoring the User Experience
Though the relationship between software engineering and user experience is not always an easy one, software engineers and UX professionals share some common goals. Both have a vested interest in producing systems that are useful and usable. This column will explore how we can apply software engineering concepts and practices in the context of user experience design and, hopefully, build greater understanding between the two disciplines.
Hornsby, Peter. UXmatters (2009). Articles>User Experience>Usability
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Using Verbs As Nouns in User Interfaces
To better manage interactions with such large datasets, we’ve incorporated the concept of views, in the same way that Microsoft Outlook and SQL Builder use them. However, my initial usability testing has found that the concept of views is escaping most people, and I think it often boils down to the term itself. Even if I show users what the software does—and they pretty much always like it when they see it—they still often cannot get over the initial hurdle of the naming convention.
Six, Janet M. UXmatters (2009). Articles>User Experience>Diction>User Interface
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Out of Box Experience: Getting it Right First Time
The out of box experience (OOBE) describes the users first interaction with a product or service. In the technology sector this first experience invariably involves plugging stuff in, installing some software and crossing your fingers in the hope that the product will work. The problem is that, in far too many cases, it doesn’t.
Frontend Infocentre (2009). Articles>User Experience>User Centered Design>Usability
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It is important to remember that the experience a person has using a product or service is every bit as important as that product or services usability.
Frontend Infocentre (2009). Articles>User Experience>Usability>Emotions
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From Technical Writer to User Engagement Specialist?
Products and tools must evolve to ensure that user experience does not suffer as technical writers evolve their delivery to suit this modern age. If a user has a question, there should be only one place to search, and those results should contain relevant hits from all possible content sources.
LugIron Software Blog (2009). Articles>Writing>Technical Writing>User Experience
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Growing Happy Users -- One Customer at a Time
Technical writing is a profession in transition. The way companies think of, use, and manage the people who help users make sense of and use products is absolutely changing. A lot of companies have started to use the term “information developer” to describe their technical writing positions. I don’t really care what label the profession chooses for itself, but I do know this: if technical writers don’t transition more than their job title then they will be missing out on a huge opportunity to move from the “gotta do it” category into the “can’t live without it” one.
Stern, Paula. LugIron Software Blog (2009). Articles>User Centered Design>User Experience>Technical Writing
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I’ve been browsing a lot of online documentation lately and in a past life I spent an enormous amount of time worrying about how my users were interacting with documentation. It never ceases to amaze me how bad most product documentation is, especially when the documentation is published in a half-measured attempt on the web. Do companies not realize the negative effect poor documentation, both content and presentation, have on their users?
LugIron Software Blog (2009). Articles>Documentation>Technical Writing>User Experience
