What Is User Experience (and What Is It Not)?

The term “user experience” (UX) can be difficult to explain to colleagues and friends. This article is meant to provide an approachable definition of user experience, explain the ever growing professional field of UX, and distinguish UX from other commonly confused concepts and ideas.

(UX-ers: Send this article to family or friends who struggle with understanding UX, or who still think you’re a graphic designer or an IT specialist.)

What Is User Experience (UX)?

It’s helpful to distinguish between the term “user experience” used to describe users’ interactions with a product or service and the broader concept of user experience as a design discipline.

UX as a Set of Interactions

The term “user experience” was coined by Don Norman, principal emeritus at NN/g, in the 1990s to describe all possible aspects of a person’s interactions with a company and its products or services. These aspects could include discovering a product, purchasing that product, setting it up in a home or office, using it for the first time, using it for the 100th time, updating or replacing it, and everything in between and beyond.

In a nutshell, user experience is concerned with what it’s subjectively like to use a product or service and how a person feels about using that product or service to accomplish a goal.

A user experience is the holistic relationship — encompassing perceptions, emotions, and interactions — between a person and a product, service, or company.

Imagine the last time you purchased something on a website. What did you do? Could you find what you were looking for? Did you have confidence that you bought the right thing? Did you ever feel frustrated? Were there annoying distractions? Did you ever feel grateful for useful descriptions or other content? Did it take too long to find what you needed? All of these potential feelings, thoughts, and actions make up a user’s experience.

While that definition may feel slightly intangible — and rightly so (a person’s experience is an abstract and subjective concept) — there are more-granular, specific quality attributes of UX that professionals use to study and evaluate the design of products and services, such as:

• Accessibility: Does the design consider and enable people of all abilities?
• Usability: Can people effectively accomplish what they need to do with the design?
• Credibility: Do people perceive the design as trustworthy or untrustworthy?
• Satisfaction: How enjoyable and efficient to use is the design?
• Usefulness: How valuable is the design? Does it solve a problem for users?

UX practitioners — people who are concerned with understanding and improving the relationship between users and companies, products, or services — use these quality attributes to measure and improve facets that impact user experience.

UX as a Practice

Around the same time that Norman coined the term “user experience,” the first user-experience-architect office was opened at Apple. If customers do indeed experience a relationship with companies and products, it stands to reason that improving that experience would be a worthwhile business strategy for increasing market share and customer acquisition. Companies began to realize that they needed to hire professionals to focus on understanding and enhancing user experience.

UX practitioners are those people. They seek to understand and improve user experience, leaning on academic and professional understandings of human behavior –- psychology, technology, and principles of design — among other areas of expertise.

The field of user experience (UX) is a professional practice focused on designing and enhancing the interactions and overall experience for all users of a product, service, or brand. UX aims to create a consistent, positive, and accessible experience that considers the needs and expectations of a broad audience rather than of just one individual.

Today, the field of UX is robust. It is made up of professionals who specialize in various aspects of intersecting fields and bring their expertise to roles such as UX researchers, developers, designers, writers and content specialists, product managers, and many more.

Common UX Misconceptions

Let’s add to our definition of user experience by distinguishing UX from related concepts that are commonly confused with it.

UX ≠ Usability

Usability is a specific aspect of user experience that focuses on how easy, efficient, and satisfying it is for a person to accomplish their goals with a product or system. In usability testing, we examine whether users can complete tasks smoothly, without unnecessary hurdles or frustration, and measure factors like learnability, efficiency, and error rate.

However, while usability is crucial, it represents only a fraction of what user experience entails. UX encompasses a broader, more holistic view, considering not just task efficiency but also the entire ecosystem of users’ interactions, emotions, and behaviors across all touchpoints with the product, service, or brand. UX also looks at the context of use, brand perception, emotional responses, and the long-term relationships users build with a product, extending beyond immediate functionality or usability. Thus, while good usability contributes to a positive UX, UX encompasses a much richer set of dimensions aimed at creating meaningful, engaging experiences for all users.

UX ≠ UI

A user interface (UI) is the set of components (e.g., buttons, clickable links) and design elements (e.g., images, icons, headers) that comprise a product such as a website or application. UI is how the product looks and enables people to interact with it. UX encompasses all aspects of the end-user’s interaction with the company, its services, and its products — not just how a page on a website or a screen within an application looks and behaves.

Don Norman and Jakob Nielsen summed up the distinction between UX and UI nicely with this example: “Consider a website with movie reviews. Even if the UI for finding a film is perfect, the UX will be poor for a user who wants information about a small independent release if the underlying database only contains movies from the major studios.”

UX ≠ A Single Interaction, Product, or Device

Though user-experience professionals often contribute to the design of digital products (e.g., websites, software, desktop applications, mobile applications), neither a single digital product alone, nor the device (e.g., mobile phone, tablet, computer) used to access and use it encompass a complete user experience. User experience is a holistic view concerned with the way people experience that product’s entire ecosystem, not just the device or product alone. Designing a single product, like a website, does not necessarily make someone a user-experience designer. It makes them a website designer — one who, hopefully, cares about and thoughtfully impacts aspects of user experience with their design choices.

UX ≠ Technology

UX is human-centered more than technology-focused. In fact, one of our UX slogans is “UX is people,” meaning that UX methodologies center on understanding human needs and desires and adapting products and services (and technology) to that understanding, not the other way around. Though technology is a key consideration of user experience because it can both enable and constrain our ability to deliver useful, usable products, UX practitioners strive to align technology to how people think and behave, rather than forcing people to adopt a machine mindset in order to use something.

UX ≠ A Nice-to-Have

Good UX is not just a nice-to-have; it’s a business imperative. When people are at the center of design and business decisions, the resulting user experience can be an invaluable differentiator for products and services in a competitive marketplace. Unfortunately, many organizations (especially those with low UX maturity) still consider UX a “nice-to-have,” and, when budget tradeoffs must be made, UX is the first to go. This is a shame for everyone, because teams supported with adequate UX roles and knowledge are enabled to create better products that serve and support customers while contributing to overall business goals, such as reducing customer-training time and support tickets, increasing conversions and ratings, growing active users, and decreasing returns and customer churn.

UX ≠ CX (Or, Is It?)

User experience and customer experience (CX) are closely related but distinct. Most user-experience professionals focus on creating and improving digital products and ensuring that the interactions people have with those products are efficient and satisfying. CX, on the other hand, encompasses the entire journey that a customer has with a brand, covering every touchpoint — from advertising to customer support to post-purchase followup. While UX is typically one component of CX, CX is generally broader, considering users’ relationship with the brand as a whole.

The line between UX and CX is often blurred, especially as digital experiences increasingly shape overall brand perception. More important than the exact distinction is the shared goal of both disciplines: to create meaningful, positive experiences that foster loyalty and satisfaction. Ultimately, whether we label it UX or CX, what matters is a unified philosophy of prioritizing users’ and customers’ needs across every interaction.

What Is Next for UX?

The field of UX is expanding and, in many ways, redefining itself. Over the last 40 years, we have seen new practitioners entering the field at a faster and faster pace, and the acceptance and acknowledgment of UX methodologies and mindsets are becoming a new global standard. (We are honored to have attendees from over 100 different countries at our UX training events.)

Yet, UX as a discipline is, in some ways, still unsettled. Amid economic pressures, many companies still sacrifice UX first when faced with budget cuts, reducing or even eliminating UX departments to save money. This is, of course, short-sighted and dangerous. Despite a growing awareness of UX, most companies still fall in the bottom half of our UX-maturity scale. And, as people continue to interact with products and services across more devices, more channels, and in new ways (e.g., through AI-driven experiences) UX mindsets and knowledgeable professionals are needed more than ever!

While UX-specific roles are necessary, product teams, CX groups, and other somewhat adjacent functions must prioritize articulating and demonstrating how their value and work directly impact business goals in order to secure business buy-in for UX initiatives (and budget for UX roles and work).

Regardless of what we choose to call this work, UX as a mindset (i.e., a user-first mentality that prioritizes creating meaningful, positive experiences) should occur in every department. The shared philosophy remains essential, regardless of the label: prioritizing people’s needs, creating meaningful interactions, and fostering positive, intuitive experiences.

By focusing on the value UX brings and learning to effectively communicate that value to decision-makers, UX professionals can help secure a place for this vital perspective in whatever shape the future holds.