I recently attended my sister's wedding, which gave so many dispersed family members from all over the country to convene to see an incredibly happy moment between two genuinely amazing people in love, but also to ask me, one by one: "What is UX design?"

Over the course of the afternoon and then evening, I got pretty good at making this somewhat ephemeral field of User Experience make sense to even my most technologically impaired grandparents, all of whom still have @aol.com email addresses -- in fact, all of my family over the age of forty-five have @aol.com email addresses; we'll get to that in a little bit. Back to the story; I love the chance to evangelize for UX design, and this was a 6-hour, 30-second-pitch gauntlet to people, all of whom I dearly love, and many of whom are of the internet-is-just-a-series-of-tubes persuasion.

The analogy I ended up using was between UX design and architecture. Specifically, I was asked quite a few times if I code. Not really, but I do have to understand the code. The relationships really do fit together well: an architect considers building materials, costs, clients' needs, customers' needs, regulations, and ultimately decides what the shape and layout of the final product will be, and can hand blueprints to skilled builders -- these would be your web and app developers, front-end and back-end -- who then construct the object itself to the UX designers' specifications, wireframes, and prototypes.

The word "architect" is defined by Google's handy definition search as, among other similar uses, "a person who designs buildings and advises in their construction." A little tweak to that would make it a perfect definition for what a UX designer is: "a person who designs digital products, websites, or applications (apps) and advises in their construction".

What about UX Researchers and UI Designers?

The analogy gets a bit shaky here, as all analogies are bound to find their limits, but we can ride it right to the edge because it really did seem to help my elders understand just what I've gone and become. The most commonly conflated terms would be UX designer and UI designer, and they're the easiest of the two specializations to conflate, as they both have very important roles in how the final building will look. If the UX designer is the architect, and the developers are the builders, the UI designer is both interior and exterior decorator, as well as landscape architect. Just as good decorators and landscape architects are so often skilled artists, good UI designers typically have lots of experience with graphic design, art, and/or typography.

Good UX designers, though, are not necessarily experienced graphic designers or artists or typographers. Oftentimes, they're psychologists or any other manner of creative or analytical empathizers. It's the same with good UX researchers, not surprisingly. It's difficult to put UX researchers into this analogy, but I imagine there are very similar positions in architecture firms, those professionals who go and find out what the building's occupants actually want from the building before anything else gets done. Please comment if you're more knowledgeable of architecture firms and can clarify or correct me, but even if there is not such a position when it comes to building design, a hypothetical one will do to help the analogy make it over this last hill.

Now, when someone is designing their own website or house or store, they often typically are the entire package in one. A low-traffic store or humble abode can suffice with one ambitious builder doing the designing and decorating and content to boot. As is the case with businesses, though, stores and the like, the more ambitious and well-prepared entrepreneurs spring for the architects and decorators, and they enjoy the benefits of deliberated design: more sales and more return business thanks to an intuitive, accessible, and inviting layout serving their clients, users, and customers exactly what they want. These more ambitious undertakings require a team effort. Each must play their part to execute the construction of a winning design to suit the needs of the stakeholders (proprietors, landlords, etc. in the case of physical buildings) and users (customers, tenants, attendees, etc.) alike.

The analogy finally breaks when we consider the real differences between the limitations of physical structures and digital ones. A UX designer's job in an Agile development environment is iterative. It's a lot easier to change the way a website or app looks, feels, and behaves than it is to change the shape of a building after it's been built. To that end, a UX designer can and often will be employed full-time to continually discover improvements to be made in the ever-evolving quest toward an ever-evolving perfection, whereas an architect moves on to the next project. There are these sorts in the UX world as well, and this is often (but not always) the difference between in-house and agency designers.

I hope this has been a nice and informative read, and would love to hear from you in the comments!

Edit: Ah, but why do my older relatives still have @aol.com email addresses? Well, that has something to do with UX design, after all. Just about the only thing a company like AOL can do to lose users is offend them. AOL knows their users, and they know how to not offend them: don't change too much. Don't change what the buttons do, where they go, even their color is better left unchanged. I have not used AOL in over 15 years, but I bet you I could go and check my father's email if he asked me to. Suffice to say, no competitor and certainly not AOL has done a single thing to make these users leave. I got my first gmail address right when it came out simply because the previous address was, in fact, attached to my father's AOL account. I still use that address. Will I continue to use it until my hair is grey or gone? That depends on how much it changes, I think.