What is UX (user experience)?

Two core definitions

Don Norman and Jakob Nielsen define it broadly. User experience covers every aspect of the end user's interaction with the company, its services and its products.

The ISO 9241-210:2019 standard looks at the person instead. In its definition, user experience is the perceptions and responses that result from the use or anticipated use of a system, product or service.

One detail in the second definition matters: "anticipated use". The experience starts before anyone opens the app. The promise in an ad and the reviews on the store page are part of it.

Why it matters

According to Norman and Nielsen, the first requirement of a good experience is meeting the customer's needs without fuss or bother. Next come simplicity and elegance, which make products a joy to own and use.

The same article adds a warning. Giving users a checklist of the features they say they want is not enough for a good experience.

That's why UX is never one team's job. Engineering, marketing, graphic and industrial design and interface design all have to work together.

When users get stuck at a step, they don't ask which team built it; they blame the company. In my view UX work starts by finding those sticking points.

An example: parcel tracking

Say you order something from an online shop. After that you go through these steps: the confirmation email, the shipping text message, the tracking screen, the courier at the door and, if needed, a return.

The tracking screen may be beautifully designed. But if the link in the text message doesn't open, or the courier drops the parcel at a pickup point without telling you, the experience is still bad.

Norman and Nielsen give a similar example. However good a film search interface is, it's no use if the independent film you're looking for isn't in the database.

Terms people mix up

UX and usability. Usability is a quality attribute of the interface: how easy the system is to learn, how efficient and how pleasant it is to use. User experience is wider: an app that's easy to use can still give a bad experience because of a poor returns process.

UX and UI. UI (user interface) is the screens people see and touch. Norman and Nielsen call the interface a very important part of the design. Still, the interface is not the same as the whole experience. I explain the difference with examples in the what is UI/UX guide.

Related terms

• User-centred design: the approach that puts users at the centre of the process. ISO 9241-210 covers it.
• Mental model: the picture in the user's head of how a system works.
• Information architecture: how content is grouped and named.
• Nielsen's 10 usability heuristics: the checklist used to evaluate an interface.

If you want to see where the experience breaks in your own product, I go through the steps one by one in the UX audit guide.