Experience design

Experience design, or UX design, is the discipline that designs a user's overall experience with a product or service. It goes beyond the interface: it takes in the complete journey, the emotions felt at each step, the real contexts of use and users' expectations. The aim is to design products that meet real needs, not just features listed in a specification.

UX design is concerned with the overall experience: the user journey, the interaction logic, the information architecture, meeting needs. UI design is concerned with the visual interface: the layout, the typography, the colours, the graphic components. The two disciplines are complementary and often practised by the same people, but they answer different questions: UX the « what and why », UI the « how it looks ».

Four main phases are generally distinguished: research (understanding users and their needs), definition (framing the problem to solve), design (exploring solutions and prototyping them) and evaluation (testing with real users). These phases are not linear: you iterate according to what you learn at each evaluation. Experience design is a process of gradually reducing uncertainty.

Yes. Experience design applies to any kind of interaction between a user and a system, whether digital or physical. A journey in a bank branch, a self-order kiosk in fast food or a telephone onboarding process all fall within experience design. This is why we speak of service design for experiences that combine physical and digital channels.

It depends on the phase of the project. In research: personas, user journeys, experience maps. In design: wireframes, interactive prototypes, information architectures. In evaluation: user testing reports, prioritised recommendations. In production: functional specifications, design system, interaction guides. The deliverables are not ends in themselves: they serve to align the teams and to document the decisions.