The term user experience was coined by Don Norman, founder of the Nielsen Norman Group, in 1993 when he invented the term in interviews. At the time, there had only been the terms of human interface and usability. He wanted a term to encompass all parts of a person’s experience with a system including the physical interaction, the manual, the industrial design, and the graphics.
The Nielsen Norman Group serves as an excellent resource to spread UX knowledge. It holds over 1,000 articles of research findings, reports, books, guidelines, and UX methods. It also offers many UX conferences, seminars, and even a certification program.
User experience, also referred to as UX, applies to all the interactions between a user, a company, and its products or services. User experience design helps shape this experience by considering how to improve these relationships.
Closely related to user interface, the difference lies in the fact that user interface solely deals with digital aspects of user experience including the look, feel, and interactivity of websites and apps. UX considers all digital and physical interactions.
UX design considers aspects such as how easy it is to grip a hammer, the placement of a product on a shelf, the music a customer hears in a store, or even how good instructions are for the assembly of a product. User experience is calculated by how difficult it is to interact with user interface elements such as buttons, sliders, text entry fields, and so on.
UX research can be conducted in various ways. Card sorting, contextual interviews, focus groups, personas, prototyping, surveys, usability testing, and use cases to name a few. The UX research process goes through a cycle of discovering, exploring, testing, and listening.
The goal is to create a product truly relevant to users that is easy and pleasurable to use while also improving ROI. This could be shown through increased sign-ups, customer satisfaction, brand loyalty, customer service calls, conversion rates, or purchases.