A dev, designer, and a PM are asked the same question: What is UX? | Hacker News Reader

A dev, designer, and a PM are asked the same question: What is UX?

blog.codelitt.com

"What is UX?"

"We don't know what UX is, everyone who's asked has a different answer, and it ultimately depends on your product and its users."

Sounds about right.

Honestly surprised this blogspam made it this high on HN. If it was on medium it'd have another hundred votes at least.

Isn’t the point of the post to highlight that people in different roles could all be looking at the the same thing but interpret is very differently?

(Note: I haven't read the article yet; I'm just commenting on general writing practices)

It's the responsibility of the person trying to gather and present disparate ideas to synthesize them into a coherent conclusion. This is often hard work, and failing to do so diminishes the effectiveness of the rest of the piece.

I feel like this is a better Ask HN prompt than an article. This article is shit. "What is UX?" is a good, important conversation for people like us to have periodically.

> Take a pencil, for example. There’s the way that the wood, plastic or metal feels on your hand, the way it falls on your fingers, the feel of the graphite against the paper ... it’s all been thoroughly thought out and designed, each component a part of the experience of writing with a pencil.

To attempt to parallel the ergonomics of a pencil, good or otherwise, with some grand UX narrative feels inappropriate. If the 'interaction of graphite on paper' is to your liking that is very much an accident of design rather than a result of any pencil designer's intention. 3b, HB, or 3H madam? Methinks that the primary driver of the pencil factory of both yesteryear and today would be maximisation of production vs units of wood, lead, or rubber. The 'way it falls on your fingers' a consequence of resource constraints nothing more.

The experience of writing with a pencil is perhaps the better for not being messed with.

The pencil survives and has survived by being always useful, value for money, and fit for purpose.

Model those attributes and users will accommodate and grow to love your products UX regardless of its failings.

The pencil has been iterated upon countless times, by a huge number of individuals and organisations. They also have a huge variety of forms for different uses and contexts: carpenters pencils, steno pencils, charcoal pencils, pencils for users with disabilities, etc.

These factors are influenced by material constraints and opportunities, but don't discount the importance of design iteration in the simplest of objects.

And as someone who has spent a lot of time drawing, the feel and quality of different pencils (wood, graphite hardness etc.) is something people care an awful lot about.

Also: isn't the UX of a pencil very close to the UNIX philosophy of having little tools that do one thing and one thing well, and work together with other things?

In that sense most software today isn't a pencil. It is more like a fully furbished office where you are not allowed to use a pencil but you have to use a silly oversized rubber-ballpen with decorative feathers instead. Oh and the paper is made of plastic and you are not allowed to change it because the guy at the door will beat you with a stick. On the bright side the filing cabinet might be the best you have ever seen — but you really aren't enjoying it all that much because you feel forced to write on plastic with a goofy pen that changes colours every 4 months. Ah, and you are forbidden to take the plastic writings out of the room (again the man with the stick).

I cannot believe that it is 2020 and the best thing we came up with is still just a text based shell (nothing against those, they are great, but I'd love to see the same modularity in typical GUI applications).

If 2020 Silicon Valley had to invent the pencil, it would be shaped like a smartphone, include chat apps and "social," require special paper to write with, and send everything the user writes back to the company's server.

Something like these, perhaps?

https://www.thearchitectsguide.com/articles/best-smart-pen

(#7 includes saving to Slack)

something like these? https://bestjigsawguide.com/

UX's meaning (aside from sounding cool) is so unclear that people are writing articles since years, trying to explain it.

It is a useful, buzzword-y term to say: "I care about how users interact with this". Or: "The UX in this part needs improvement".

"UX Design" however is confusing especially when attached to a role. The output of a "UX Designer" is (at least eventually) a UI. So they are a UI Designer? Well no, it is all about the "experience"! My UX is pretty bad here because the software is buggy. Is the engineer who fixes the bug a UX Designer now?

You often see the term UX alongside UI, like this: UI/UX. This is because the designer wants to emphasize what they care about, but they secretly know that the thing they design is the actual UI, not the "experience".

Yes indeed. Subsets of it are real, but it's also used as a lazy shortcut that hides reality.

My experience of UX almost everywhere is 'this label gives me jurisdiction to apply my personal biases to the redevelopment of this site'.

Only one company I've been at had UX people who spent as much time talking with existing/possible future users to ground their ideas in genuine data as they did using and understanding the product.

And the "UX people" you describe were doing important work right? Maybe stuff like testing/QA, building domain knowledge, analyzing feedback, building trust with clients/users, writing specs, mockups, documentation, designing UI components etc.

The thing that is useful here is this: the company you refer to understood that there needs to be people, who understand the whole process and talk to each other.

The slightly annoying part is that we call them "UX people". The term doesn't acknowledge at all that they are doing important, challenging, specific things.

And I get that this is about "experience" somehow, but everything is. We are so bad with terms in our industry.

>the "UX people" you describe were doing important work right? Maybe stuff like testing/QA, building domain knowledge, analyzing feedback, building trust with clients/users, writing specs, mockups, documentation, designing UI components etc.

I think the frustration with "UX people" is that they aren't necessarily doing any of those well-defined things that are all part of UX, but instead doing some nebulous stuff because nobody really knows what UX means.

Calling some people on the team "UX people" carries the implication that everybody else on the team (testers, customer service, documentation, ui designers, backend devs, SREs) are somehow not working on UX. Everybody on a product team is a UX person, so for somebody to only be a UX person essentially means they have no role.

UX people would ideally be like a scrum master, ie. be the person facilitating UX in teams. They end up designing in a corner stuff that takes ages to be picked up in dev, while ignoring test.

>The output of a "UX Designer" is (at least eventually) a UI.

Not only. For example if you add 2000 ms to 15000 ms of latency after each click then you might think it is still the same UI. In fact in a sense it is still the same UI.

In my opinion by contrast (and contrary to your sentence) the UX designer's output can include the latency budget by which the page must be fully returned. This additional output is captured by a term such as UI/UX.

A UI designer has no say about responsiveness (latency). A UX designer does.

latency is still UI. It is the way it operates, you're confounding two things: 1) How does something operate 2) How does something visually look in 2D space

They're both the same when we talk about UI including a bunch of other things - smell (stores?), haptics (button response), sound (beep when you autofocus on the camera), texture and a whole bunch more.

There is no need for this bullshit term - UX. It is designer woo woo. "Experiential value" - oh you mean, the way user interfaces with the world? It is still an interface.

User Interface. An interface to the user. What more do you need to define?

> A UI designer has no say about responsiveness (latency). A UX designer does

That is definitely not true. UI design encompasses usability, including interactivity, feedback, animations, etc. Otherwise it's just graphic design.

I think the term UX was defined to go way beyond those concerns, and into areas from marketing, branding, copywriting, all the way to what the actual product is, how it is offered, even pricing. Some simple examples: timing and content of emails, purchasing options and how they are displayed, how multiple platforms (mobile, desktop, snailmail, phone) are tied together, content strategy.

You can see that aspiration reflected in the designer responses in the beginning of the article: they are the ones mentioning the business side, and not the managers.

>I think the term UX was defined to go way beyond those concerns, and into areas from marketing, branding, copywriting, all the way to what the actual product is, how it is offered, even pricing.

Interesting! I'm totally on board with this set of concerns - but can you find any reference for your statement? (Anybody on the web who gave a definition of UX similar to yours?)

This is part of writing a specification so I would just call this Software Design. The author of such a requirement better have a firm grasp at the technical side of things.

There’s a lot of misunderstanding about what UX really is, but it’s quite easy to give a good definition: it’s a data-driven approach to UI design, which is based on studies of user psychology and diversity and using those studies to align UI with the business needs (which may not coincide with user needs, hence „dark UX patterns“). UX is never about personal perception or preference of designers and developers, there‘s no place for likes and dislikes. The „UI/UX“ in the job title is a non-sensical recruiting bullshit, usually describing a visual designer without any real UX knowledge.

While I agree about not being personal, I don't agree that it has to be data-driven in the formal way you seem to be implying. Its also quite possible to build horrendous UX (even it it's supposed to be a dark pattern) while being data-driven, just like it's possible to build garbage software despite having thousands of unit tests with 100% coverage.

I think it really comes down to: can your users effectively use the software.

To me, having to refer to documentation, go through training, or just "get used to it" are all indicators of poor UX. At the same time, in some cases those are acceptable requirements because, for example, you're building medical UIs that only highly-trained medical professionals are going to use. (I'd still argue you should make it better: a pro won't care that a tooltip defines an acronym, or a warning appears if you set possibly incompatible parameters, etc)

What constitutes "good" UX is always going to be somewhat subjective. There's some software that's got a truly awful interface (ever look at ERP stuff?) but whose users spend most of their day using it and are massively effective because they've memorized shortcuts and all the quirks. It has good UX for existing users, awful UX for new users - so how does that get classified?

Data-driven means proven efficiency for target audience in the long run, so it’s good by design. This may still create bad UX for people outside the target group (e.g. by creating a steep learning curve because of the trade-off between discoverability and performance), but things outside the scope of design do not really matter and do not have to be classified. Inclusiveness does not matter in technical and design topics if it has no business value.

No it's really quite simple.

Annoying = Bad UX.

What does a USER experience when interacting with your product/company.

So yes, everything is a part of UX. The UI, the software, hell even customer support.

It doesn't help that people keep broadening the definition of terms to be basically all-encompassing. I wanted to write a comment about industrial interface design as an example of a concrete and useful discipline, but I can't find any useful information now. It's hard now to find information on human-machine interfacing vs. computer user interfaces, but as I recall those were once separate disciplines. A quick search for HMI had an article about social distancing of all things.

> It is a useful, buzzword-y term to say: "I care about how users interact with this". Or: "The UX in this part needs improvement".

This. I like the term "UX bug" a lot, ex.

>We have a lot of support issues with doing X.

"Hmm, that's not a bug; users are just doing X wrong."

>Ok, then maybe it's a UX bug.

The first paragraph summarized 3 different ways:

We asked neurologists, psychiatrists, and sociologists about human decision making. * The neurologists focused on stimuli and the brain. * The psychiatrists focused on the behaviors of individuals. * The sociologists focused on interactions between human groups.

We asked physicists, chemists, and biologists about the building blocks of the world. * The physicists focused on forces of nature. * The chemists focused on molecules and their chemical interactions. * The biologists focused on cells and organisms.

We asked engineers, designers, and project managers about UX. * The engineers focused on the interactions between the engineered bits of the UX and the users. * The designers focused on the 2 groups that have opinions about UX design: the company and the users. * The project managers focused on how well the UX got the project done.

That this link should currently be showing only a huge '500' with a raw error message as subhead strikes me as apropos, in a sidewise kind of way.

The Internet Archive caught it before it broke: http://web.archive.org/web/20200709170526/https://blog.codel...

I appreciate you.

I’m an engineer. The only definition I’ve used is the one pointed out here as the PM perspective: how are your users using the product, what are their pain points, how can you make it more pleasant for them? Understanding how to put yourself into their shoes is the hardest. Understanding how to quantify and measure that experience is even harder.

> They cared about making sure that the brand’s values were enhancing the experience.

What does this even mean?

Facebook wants to show you ads. You want to see updates from your friends and family. Facebook will come up with a clever way to show you updates from your friends and family but not all at once and not all at the top. So, you'll have to scroll and scroll and scroll to see updates and might even have to visit multiple times to see updates, all the while seeing a lot of ads along the way.

UX enhancing brand values! :D

It seems weird that a designer would focus on "brand values" over a good user experience. I guess they are answering in the context of a working for a company and not just being a designer. I assumed "enhancing the user experience" meant making the user experience better, but clearly that's not what it means.

Big companies do this weird thing where they get a bunch of passionate people to oppose each other when creating a solution, and then take some weird Frankenstein middle ground that appeals to no one except the budget and timeline.

https://uxplanet.org/brand-experience-and-user-experience-e0...

That the whole interaction is consistent with brand guidelines, values and identity. It’s called Brand Experience, and it’s often a conversation in really big company interface design.

I get branding and brand guidelines. I just don't get what "brand values" are and what they have to do with UX.

Think of "brand values" as words that describe the product "simple to use" or "powerful" or "elegant" or "photoshop" or "vim like".

Those all result in very different UX/UI.

I took it as honesty in marketing copy. So I dont sign up for Instagram expecting a Banking app, and so the business doesnt misrepresent its product. Or that the marketing department doesnt get caught up in spin or fluff. If the brand values emphasize the wrong part of the product, the experience the person experiences is jarring and disorientating.

Server error at the moment - below is the full text:

* * *

Some weeks ago I asked a few of the Codelitt team members a simple question:

    “What is UX?”

I was happy that no one shied away from answering, and the difference in their responses was incredible:

Engineers focused their answers in very pragmatic areas that all revolved around friction and how to reduce it. The experience “behind the curtain” that helps make interactions smooth was what they thought of. Things like loading times or making sure that buttons were clickable came to their minds.

Designers saw the importance of researching both the users and business who would be investing in the product. They cared about making sure that the brand’s values were enhancing the experience. They wanted the users & customers to know exactly what to expect when interacting with their products.

Project Managers focused on understanding and empathizing with the users so that the end product is intuitive and useful to the user.

Simply put, UX means “User Experience”: it’s the experience that a user has while interacting with a product. UX Design is, by definition, the process by which we determine what that experience will be.

UX Design always happens. Whether it’s intentional or not, somebody makes the decisions about how the human and the product will interact. Good UX Design happens when we make these decisions in a way that understands and fulfills the needs of both our users and our business.

UX encompasses so many disciplines that it’s unfair to think of it as a sphere within visual design. Quite the contrary! The building of an interface is a subset of that product’s experience design.

UX happens whenever a human interacts with a product. Any product. Take a pencil, for example. There’s the way that the wood, plastic or metal feels on your hand, the way it falls on your fingers, the feel of the graphite against the paper. Does it have a rubber end or a button you have to press to get the graphite out? In every case, it’s all been thoroughly thought out and designed, each component a part of the experience of writing with a pencil.

From the business objective, to the product’s stakeholders, designers, engineers and project managers, the experience encompasses every person working on it. It is the culmination of a multitude of disciplines working together. Every decision we make when building a product shapes that experience. UX is at the heart of everything we do.

Thanks for providing this summary! :)

> "Simply put, UX means “User Experience”: it’s the experience that a user has while interacting with a product."

I believe it's broader than that. The experience is a lasting effect. It starts while interacting with the product, but can continue after that moment is over. Like a sip of wine has a post-swallow finish, so does an experience.

For example, I ordered some things for my car this morning from Advanced Auto Parts. I can walk to a B&M location but have sworn off going there after a sloppy clerk over-charged me.

In any case the web experience worse and took far too long. I'm still regretting it. I'll never shop there - online or in store again. I'll even go so far to say I have some ill will for Amex, as it was their perk that go me there.

The product is long gone but my experience lives on.

For the visually oriented, this description of UX in image form can't be beat: https://imgur.com/mAttwt6

Spoiler alert; The answer currently appears to be 500.

Well, my first thought is still "Unix, obviously" :)

For fun I looked it up on Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UX . User experience is not listed under Software but under Science/Computing, so a reader would still first find Unix :)

I like to start by explaining that UX has existed for over 5000 years: in the way tools are fashioned, pottery is turned, fields are plowed, food is prepared, instruments are played, lore and laws are written, etc. UX is ubiquitous, and determines how readily a person can internalize and then utilize a new concept.

Speaking of UX on their own website, they don't have links to the projects they accomplished in case studies like Halo and Fletcher.

Good luck finding Fletcher in a Google search or even "Fletcher Product Review" or "Fletcher Software Review" or "Fletcher Review" in a search.

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