The job of UX designers is to make users more efficient, in turn increasing their happiness and, by extension, your success. But being in control of that balance between the goals of users and your business is hard. We asked Michael Heilemann, director of interface at Squarespace, and Aarron Walter, director of user experience at MailChimp, to share their UX knowledge.

User experience is not interface design. Not even close. It doesn’t happen in Photoshop, nor is it the last step of building a product. If you’re occupied with a user-focused strategy, analysis, user studies, and the psychological aspects of design, that’s what we consider user experience design. There are multiple methods to help you with this.

Device Knowledge: What are the strengths and weaknesses of a specific device and how does that influence your product? A touch device works consistently different than a desktop.

Writing Personas: What would your typical user look like? How do they relate to the product?

Design Patterns: What is the commonly accepted way to check out on e-commerce websites?

In large projects, user experience design can be completely separated from the actual user interface design, information architecture, and interaction design. Although realistically this rarely happens and usually those aspects are combined in one job in the majority of agencies and startups.

“Our goal is to make software that’s functional, reliable, and usable so people can get their work done,” says Aarron Walter. “But we think designing software that’s just usable is like a chef creating food that’s just edible. People are attracted to more than just the practical. We want the things we interact with to appeal to our emotions.”

User experience is definitely something you feel. Interestingly enough, it’s not just based on opinions but also supported by psychology and the knowledge of how humans interact and behave. Engagement and frustration play a role in digital interfaces. How something looks and how clever interfaces are directly reflects how we feel about a product.

“We carefully consider the emotional state of our customers at different points in their workflow so we can deliver functionality and fun at just the right times,” Walter says.

Doing a great job at user experience means you have a multi-disciplinary engagement. You can do eye tracking to understand your users better and improve your product to suit users better. In the majority, user experience operates from different perspectives: