User Experience Design
What is User Experience Design?
User experience (UX) design is the practice of creating products that are intuitive, accessible, and aligned with user needs. It focuses on optimizing usability and interaction to reduce friction and enhance engagement. By designing around human behavior, UX improves satisfaction, retention, and overall business success.
The Basic Idea
Imagine a digital world where every interaction feels effortless, intuitive, and enjoyable. Where you’re able to breeze through a checkout process and manage your bills in a matter of seconds. When the next step makes sense and leads you closer to your goal.
User Experience (UX) design makes this world possible by creating seamless interactions between us and the digital products we use. While user interface (UI) focuses more on aesthetics—how the site or app visually appeals to the user—UX narrows in on the function and flow of the entire experience, including usability, accessibility, and emotional response.
UX designers ensure that technology doesn’t get in the way of what we’re trying to accomplish. They ask questions like: is the check-out process intuitive? Are pages formatted in a way that makes sense? Is the navigation from start to finish hassle-free? Can the process be made simpler? This interdisciplinary, interactive process ties into behavioral insights, linguistics, and art.
Through usability testing, which analyzes how usable and accessible a product is, UX design helps businesses connect with us in a way that drives satisfaction and success—a win-win for everyone. In commerce, e-learning, and streaming services, UX design continues to shape our digital experiences to be as smooth, enjoyable, and efficient as possible.
“Design is the beauty of turning constraints into advantages.”
—Aza Raskin, Interface Designer and Co-Founder of The Center for Humane Technology
About the Author
Lily Yuan
Lily Yuan is a three-time author in the industrial-organizational (IO) psychology space and is always thinking about how people and ideas are connected. She works with the Strong Interest Inventory, Extended DISC, Ikigai, and positive psychology to help students and professionals excel on their career journeys. Lily enjoys improv, elevator music, HIIT workouts, and board games.
