What is User Experience Design? What is the difference between UX Design and UI Design in 2018?

Key Takeaways

and they gave to me everywhere I go [Music] what's up everybody Welcome To The Future live my name is Mr Ben Burns and today we're going to be talking about user experience design and we're going to try to put a definition to it here in the studio with me I have Mr Matthew Encina hey what's up everyone I'll be uh taking your comments on Facebook and YouTube today right on okay so why are we talking about this um what I've noticed that there's no concrete definition of what user experience design is and so there's a lot of like General confusion and some people think of it as more of like this dark mysterious art especially in the business sphere they don't really understand it and then a lot of designers you know they look at it as UI design and it kind of goes back to that old adage you know when the only tool that you have is a hammer all you see are nails and so we're going to try and Define this so let's go to The Experts and by experts I mean let's uh let's try doing a quick Google search and seeing what they say yeah you're right okay so the format of this show is going to be a little bit different um mainly the big thing is that this episode will disappear at the end of the weekend so if you guys value this information get your notebook out you want to take notes and then get that screenshot finger ready because you're going to want to take some screenshots all right so let's go to The Experts what do people say about user experience design so I found this quote and I immediately dismissed it Dan Makowski says he's the VP of design over at Walmart he says you can't design experiences but you can design for them but then the more I read the quote I realized it was it was a little bit genius because he's totally right you can't design someone's experience but you can design and try to influence it so the next one is from Joshua Porter who's the co-founder of Rocket insights and he says it's designed with an awareness of every touch point that makes up the overall experience with your product or service and this is a really cool thing but it leans a little bit too closely towards um branding and it doesn't really say anything about people it doesn't say anything about users so it's almost there the next one from Paul boag I think that's how you say his name he's a ux consultant he says ux design is so much more than just designing for a screen and he's totally right but it doesn't say what user experience design is so this is an amazing um woman named Mary Kay McCloskey and she's done a skillshare class about usability she's the director of research at user testing and she says ux design is a commitment to building products with the customer in mind and I like that but I think that user experience design is bigger than the product so the last one I want to talk about is by the guy who coined the term he actually developed what is user experience and he says I thought human interface and usability were too narrow I wanted to cover all aspects of the person's experience with the system including industrial design Graphics the interface the physical interaction and the manual and I really think that he nailed it so let's take a look at my definition of user experience design and this is influencing controllable variables to cause a positive emotional response when a person interacts with a product environment or brand now I want you guys to notice you know my initial definition of this was all screwed up and Chris was like you can't use the words user and experience in a definition of user and experience so I had to kind of reword it and he's totally right and uh you know I looped in this thing this concept about influencing variables and it's not always designed as a craft and why are we pursuing a positive positive emotional response you know a lot of these definitions are surrounding Simplicity ease of use and that's definitely a factor but sometimes people want to be a little bit confused sometimes people want a little bit of frustration and a great example a few great examples of this is things like Panic Room Games those things where you're trying to get out of the room roller coasters horror movies and puzzles so depending on the you know type of person you are and what you bring to the table you may love or hate these now in my experience my wife and her family absolutely love doing puzzles for me I have about 30 45 minutes before I take that puzzle and I just throw it out the window especially if it's one of those ones with like 10 000 pieces no thank you that's that's totally not for me I'm totally frustrated but for some people the act of clicking the puzzle piece in brings this um amazing fulfillment that they're it's almost like meditation and I see that when I'm you know interacting with my wife's family so the too long didn't read version of this is do what you can to make people feel great when they use your stuff I'm sure you're like come on Mr Ben Burns you can't tell me that's all it is I do that every day right I sit down and design you know what I'm just gonna go watch will Patterson wait don't go there's more let's talk about the two key requirements that user experience design has that sets it apart from other design uh other types of design so the first one is ux design requires interaction without interaction it's it's just design and this is what makes ux design so fun and exciting and sexy is that you're only controlling 51 of the experience you're only controlling 51 of the relationship so let's talk about the second requirement ux design requires iterative validation now iterative validation is is you know marketing jargon it's fancy ux speak for um repeated testing and without that without that validation You're simply guessing and so you need to throw away those kind of Tidy waterfall and Gantt charts and you need to focus on being able to put something out into the world see if it's working see if uh you know you're getting the result that you want and then bringing it back in and readjusting so I keep saying 51 and why is that why do we as ux designers get that extra one percent and it's the iteration by being able to do this over and over and over again we kind of have an advantage to where we can learn and execute um and kind of develop a better version for future users so I'm sure you're saying how can I do this the right way where do I start and that's where we want to talk about the two Cornerstone questions these are great places to start when you begin at a ux endeavor now the first one is what makes our users feel good and we want to go easy on the innuendos this is a professional talk here um basically we want to pursue those positive emotions we want that positive emotional response and in the beginning you're using you're guessing and that's okay and so that question should uh switch a little bit to what should make our users feel good and that's why strategy and Discovery are a must in order to answer this question you have to answer one question first is who you're designing for and so you know user profiles are are a powerful tool but before you can embark on a profile you have to know who you're designing for let's go back to that puzzle example let's say you were designing a puzzle and you chose like a big Thomas Kincaid landscape and it's like going to be 40 000 pieces and Ben Burns is going to throw it out the window but if you're designing that for a four-year-old all those design decisions are going to be completely different so you want to base all of your design decisions on a user archetype there is one caveat to this is that you know over time as you iterate your users either the profiles they could change well they they probably will they are going to change so you need to prepare to um kind of lift and shift a little bit when it comes to user profiles I don't want to dig too deep into this um user profiles is widely widely documented on the internet and we actually have a kit that's targeting this in its in and of itself is the uh the future core strategy kit so I don't want to dig too deep but I am going to give you the top four questions that you should ask and answer in your user profiles so let's kick this thing off get that screenshot finger ready what is the user's goal in this interaction why are they here why did they visit the site why are they in the restaurant what's their goal and you know this is essential to answer this question why does the user want to accomplish this goal what does this person get out of completing this puzzle I mean dear God tell me what you get out of this is it the meditation I'm really mad at puzzles today let's get nobody from the puzzle Club is here to defend the puzzles so um the third question is what tools do your users need you know is it a special user interface are you trying to design some like a a platform that somebody that's visually challenged can can navigate do they need an audio user interface you need to determine what tools they need in order for them to accomplish their goals and in order to empower them to accomplish their goals all right here's the last question of the top four what happens if the user can't finish the mission what's at stake what are they risking and this will indicate How Deeply you need to go into your testing because if the goal means a lot to a person you're going to want to spend a lot of time figuring out you know what it is you need to be doing to improve their experience all right so this is you know before we get to the next Cornerstone question I wanted to break and see if you guys had any questions for us so Matthew what do you think yeah there's uh one uh from Facebook Arjun Roy asked what's the difference between an interaction designer and a product designer by Facebook's definition oh well I don't I don't know Facebook's definition oh we can we can assume I have assumptions about that what do you think I mean I think product specific is is uh like a specific feature that they're putting on their platform right so that would be a product designer an interactive designer I think just sounds more of like a more of a general interactive designer that maybe is fixing things as they're breaking on the side and refining the overall process so I don't think it's tied to anything in particular but I feel like a product designer would be specific to a feature yeah or you know product design you know you could be looking at figuring out the business goals and aligning those to the user goals and creating things that help users accomplish different missions um where you know an interaction designer is going to really focus on the responsive nature of a digital environment what happens when a user does this what happens when the system does this what do we need to tell the user in this process to keep them from leaving next question we got one from Billy Carson he really he works uh in-house and he's curious how ux works for Client Services um okay so we're going to get into that really deeply in a later episode but iterative ux Cycles is an excellent way to build so if you consider creating a website and then releasing it out into the world that would be one cycle that would be the first Sprint if you would and so when you throw away waterfall and Gantt charts you have to bring something in in its place and that's where agile and uh you know things like lean methodology will really help if you charge by Sprint you're basically saying I'm going to charge the client for the execution in and of itself and I'm also going to charge them for the research and testing and all the stuff that comes afterwards man you are just knocking these out uh Bettina asked is a user profile and target target audience the same oh that's a great question I'm gonna say no they're not but I want to get you I mean I think they're kind of the same because it is your target audience right this is who you're trying to uh attract and interact and eventually purchase your product right so those user profiles don't necessarily mean that those two people are the same because different users has different needs so I feel like user profiles can be very specific and granular where target audience is a little bit more Broad at least in in my mind how I see the difference between those two that makes total sense yeah I think Marty newmeyer actually talks about targeting and segmentation in his books and uh he refers if I'm not mistaken he doesn't like saying that because uh targeting means that you're you're taking a mass population and then you're segmenting it and you're getting smaller and smaller and smaller with user profiles you're starting with one person and and you're encouraging them to grow that audience and so it's just a different approach I think oh I got a good one this is a follow-up to one of the slides you presented there and I don't know if this is going to be covered later but okay can you explore multiple ways to find the right what is the goal of a user interaction I think what is like you had to slide up like what what is the goal like what are what are responses to that typically okay honestly it's uh it's kind of easy to answer from the business side but that's not the right answer for the user I'll give you an example let's say you wanted to make an e-commerce website obviously the business goal is to be able to sell things on the website but that may not align to the user goal the user may they're seeking information about a product because they're looking to buy it in a retail store or maybe they want to know more about the company maybe they're an investor so there's a lot of different goals that a user can bring to an experience oh I mean this this is a simple one I forgot if you just answered it but uh so the difference between ux and UI designer no do you want to go there we will get there we will get there trust me yeah all right so let's get back to this so the first Cornerstone question you know the way that you kick off a ux engagement is figuring out what makes our users feel good the second Corner Stone question is what variables can we control and this really boils down to the six senses and I did not miss speak here I I think in ux there there are six senses we're gonna start with visuals you know things that you see smells sounds tactiles you know that touch that sense of touch tastes and then there's this thing that I call message another word that you could use it with it is uh is Vibe but it's that just that overall feeling and what they're absorbing what the message is and something that's really important to remember is that you control your output this is super important you control your output but you don't control their input and this is what I mean by this so let's pull up this slide here on the left you have all of your six senses visual sounds smells taste touch and message or vibe when you put this is you know the left side is what you control and as you output these things depending on what the experience is it gets filtered through the user and the user brings things like bias ability comprehension things that they filter your output those variables through and then after it gets filtered through the user you get two things you get the message that was received like what uh what are what's this organization this company this product trying to communicate to me and then you also get the emotional response how you felt afterwards so I kind of want to give an example on uh let's talk about William Sonoma so for those of you guys who aren't in the US or maybe you don't have this locally William Sonoma is basically heaven on Earth it's a store in the mall that sells kitchen equipment and um you know other high-end cooking supplies basically you walk in and it's like super bright and it's uh you know you see all the expensive things all over the the counters it's a little bit busy so there's there's energy there and then you've got these little ladies like behind the counter and they're shoving food samples in your face it's amazing you know I like to grab a cup of cider and and walk around Williams-Sonoma and you know the smell of things cooking it's just an awesome place for me but the reason is is because I bring a bias with me William Sonoma reminds me of my grandmother's house and my grandma's a classy lady and when I'm in there I just get all these warm fuzzy feelings and so when you look at another user somebody that you know maybe they're vegan and they walk into Williams-Sonoma and the little lady shoves a piece of beef on a toothpick in their face they're gonna have a very different message and a very different emotional reaction from that and it's the same thing with digital products as well I want you to always remember this this is super super important we seek to engineer emotions you know we're constantly testing if the emotional response that you you get equals what you hypothesized now I'm sure you're like all right burnsy you lost me you're talking about tasting samples at the mall and I'm just trying to like lay out this website dude I'm trying to like ah you're right visuals visual design is a huge part of ux but ux is bigger than visual design it's bigger than user interface so I want to frame this with a digital example so bear with me while I switch this here Matthew you ready I want to show you something yes okay so I'm going to bring up preview and what we're going to do is we are going to take a look at a digital prototype that I put together yesterday and I want to get your emotional reaction to this so guys if we could bring up the screen wrong screen hold on all right can I see it up here okay here we go Chris warned me about breaking the uh the internet and the in the keynote oh yeah does it break the internet when you go full screen on that maybe it's just too much for that Little Neck to handle there we go all right so here we have that too if you want oh you can how do you do that man Chris knows the shortcut for that oh shoot that's all good it's all good we can we can do this we can make this happen I'm not a movie from the center so that all the designers out there like their OCD all right so what we have here is an e-commerce site and we're talking about like men's shoes Chris just said he's gonna let us squirm thanks man since we don't know the preview shortcuts all right bring this bring this uh thing back up guys because I can't see it on my computer so we've got an e-commerce website prototype here um in the uh you know on the top it says men's shoes then we've got a slider with a title um then we've got you know select your type a bunch of images that's for placement only and then we've got you know I call this like a banded design where it's full full width and then we've got just like a shop now kind of thing and uh you know this is really indicative of the way that a lot of website designers actually approach digital products you know they say it includes it I've seen many many contracts like this that the images and the copy are the clients responsibility so they don't want any control over that and they don't want you know to be on the hook for that and that's fine because you're a UI designer and you're you know creating this website based on this how does this make you feel Matt kind of a broad question um but I'll try and answer it because I think I know what you're asking I mean I'm looking at that as an e-commerce site and for me like when I'm shopping at e-commerce sites just as a user like I just want to get to the thing I'm looking for right away yeah whether that's the coolest new thing that's uh being put out by that uh brand or product or the very specific like category that I'm digging in so I see that answered right away in the the first two uh slices of the site right so it's like a fantastic user interface because it's like bam it's right there yeah so usually when I go like I'll just look at those two things and I'll typically ignore everything else so I don't really know what's the rest on that side but for me it's like that answers my immediate need Okay so let's talk let's bring that back up again and let's talk about your emotional response are you getting an emotional response for this or is it just kind of like okay great I can use this not not really an emotional response but more of a functional one like I'm looking at it's like okay you've given me the thing it within one click one scroll one click okay I can get to what I need so I don't feel frustrated I think that's the biggest thing going to any website if I feel frustrated right away way then you know I already have a bad taste in my mouth for the rest of the experience of the brand right if they make it really easy for them to just serve what it is I'm looking for right away that means hey you understand me as a user you understand me as a customer and you're giving me what I want right away cool I so I'm not upset at them yet yeah in this situation you know we've actually tackled the UI what you've been looking at this prototype is user interface it's the layout it's the typography it's the way that the user interacts with this thing so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to add in some photography and then we're going to see if that changes Matthew's emotional response so let's bring this back up Aisha on Facebook said command f for full screen oh let's see if it works screw anything up yet all right so now we've added some imagery and we're looking at pictures of uh you know the Nike shoes and now we're we're seeing really Crisp Images of the of the product then we've got these emotional like Snappy uh colorful design it's almost art that they've transformed these players into I know we've got some lifestyle shots down here this thing this piece does not really make sense to me but it's it's kind of a cool image and then we kind of carry this down into the footer how does that change your emotional response well uh I mean I I can understand more of where the brand is going I'm yeah I'm a frequent buyer of Nike stuff I probably buy too many shoes a month from them unfortunately but they it's because they've made it really easy for me yeah and part of that is the ease of the experience for shopping and then also the flashy beautiful photography and the images that go with that so whatever shoes I'm like kind of interested in and they show me in a really cool context via imagery then it's just like okay now I my palette is like really what like I need to have that thing now like I I need it so what I'm hearing from you is is you're getting a little bit excited now that there's imagery in there that's that's showing you the lifestyle yes of Nike yes okay well cool let's pull this back up now the next thing I'm going to do is actually add in the messaging because if you notice we have here it says featured series featured product space one so I'm going to add in the messaging and see if that further kind of enhances your emotional response okay I'm going to try the control the command F thing here we go it didn't work who said that command command F I tried control let's see Chris is not going to save us on this one no he's not all right Aisha just wants to make us look like fools thanks Aisha oh control command F I'm sorry come in all right bring it back up I can't see that oh thank you I was sweating a little bit I was like yeah all right now we're back here we go okay so now I've actually added all of the messaging back in there and I want to call your attention to a couple things so instead of finding the right shoe type it says find the right shoe for your sport up your game in our latest Innovations for the court the field and everywhere in between and then below this we've got this awesome phrases flip the switch and you can see now this art this design this this graphical thing above there actually makes sense because it's like you're flipping the switch and even as you move down here the colors and the and the interface actually start to make sense just because of the messaging so let me ask you and now that we've added this the messaging is it further enhancing that excitement that you felt in the beginning it is and and it's also uh working on a functional level too right so for instance choose your choose your shoe or choose your sport for me I always just go to sport sport where I don't play basketball or anything like that right so those those categories are relevant to me I don't want to see any of those shoes because I don't wear those shoes yeah so it's like I know where I need to go sportswear I just want to look cool awesome all right so let's go back to that screen because I want to take it one step further so if you guys haven't figured this out yet um this is hold on let me bring this back up oh God it's so slow and it's in the wrong screen again we win so this is the actual Nike Site holy smokes navigating on this like flat screen is something else all right so I want to call attention to a couple things we have video here and it's uh you know Antonio Brown he's working out it's like there's he's getting sweaty it's just like this really masculine like pump up kind of thing which is really appropriate for the men's um page and as we scroll down that's not the only motion that we see on the screen we actually have this piece here that actually starts to make sense it's this uh gift series that that flips back and forth you can see the Rhythm it's like and we've got these words by you that are static and everything else changes and so it's communicating a completely different message so I'm going to turn it back to you how does this kind of stuff make you feel about your experience I mean it's a little bit information overload but I've come to expect that from the brand but and I like that um so I like all the flashy things I think Nike especially on the sportswear division is very flashy yeah and I like that and that that's why I'm drawn to that brand in particular uh and I like seeing all the flashy colors so again it's like raising that excitement level yeah they're trying to get you like hyped up it's trying to like instill this like ah let's go let's do it just do it oh [Music] I did not do that on purpose all right all right so let's get let's get back to the uh let's get back to the deck all right so the entire that entire exercise was really generated to show you guys that uh the interface the user interface what we saw in the beginning is much more it's it's ux is much more than that and it has to do with photography it has to do with video it has to do with messaging it has to do with interaction there's a ton of stuff that kind of builds into ux and but what are the other pieces of the puzzle right what are the other craft disciplines or practices that are included so let's once again go to The Experts and take to a Google image search so what I did what I typed in was ux design or what is ux design and I came up with a couple graphs here's the first one and guys this is God awful I'm just gonna say that right now both in execution and in concept I look at the colors I mean they got the primary colors backwards so it's just a mess right and they misspelled business analysis it's just it's just crazy the thing that I'm looking at here is I'm looking for user in this situation and I'm not seeing any so interaction that's cool there's interaction design in ux yes there's user interface that's in ux but business analysis makes up such a huge portion of this that you know we're losing focus of the actual user so this is a no-go here's the next one I found this one it's at least it looks better right but it's missing a lot of components on both sides of ux and UI and the thing that I do not like about this is that it communicates that ux and UI are are two halves of the same coin and it's not UI is inside of ux and ux is a much bigger sphere all right next one I think this guy is his name is Drew and he did a really good job of this I really like that the user is at the center and uh he's he's saying you're happy user so there's a positive emotional response going back to that always um so I really like that where this kind of falls short is that the different items around the the circle we have crafts and disciplines and then we also have metrics the things that you use to measure ux so visual design data visualization information architecture those are all disciplines of ux but then you've got you know content strategy things like functionality and usability and those are metrics that's how you you uh you measure a user experience so this is almost there not quite this one is my favorite but it is a beast there is a lot going on here I really like that user experience design is the largest Circle I think that it's it's got that right however I think it's a little bit too complex and the importance of all the different elements I think the size because size is relative to the importance in a Venn diagram like this and some of the sizes of these things are a little bit skewed like messaging is very small content requirements is very small is there a comment that I need to know about oh no no I'm just looking at things it just looks like those balloons that clowns put together oh yeah this is what it looks like what I wanted to do is I wanted to simplify and and kind of get back to the variables that we can control and that's where I kind of developed this this is what I think the disciplines of user experience are so we have visual design visual design includes user interface design photography typography graphic design color theory then we've got message this is like your copywriting the content The Voice the tone and then the grammatical style that you use we got info information architecture that's way finding the information hierarchy in in the overall organization and we have interaction Design This is like things like functional designs that you know creating the toolkit that your users need to use the platform way finding the navigation motion design responsive interaction sound design that's another ux discipline audio engineering music ambient noise and audio interaction guys this is huge with Google home and what's the one from Amazon Alexa Alexa audio interaction is massive in ux so you can't forget that then we've got physical design and physical design from in my mind includes architecture industrial design product design and interior design you know things like working with ergonomics and how we interact with physical things in physical spaces so this is how I Define the user experience disciplines and uh you know this kind of leads into user experience design process you know what does the user experience design process look like how do you go about designing a user experience and what steps do you take in order for ux design all this and more will be on our next show about ux [Laughter] all right so let's go to questions okay great I got a lot of questions great questions that uh let's see Danielle Gonzalez on YouTube she asked how do you handle a client who doesn't see the relevance of the ux process because they don't want to get charged for that in the end quote um how do you handle oh oh yeah you got a monkey on your back how do you handle that that's not willing to pay for user experience you don't you don't you handle that client I mean it's it's kind of one of those things where if if a client doesn't believe in something changing their belief system and changing their opinion about something is an uphill battle and so I would suggest finding clients that are interested in the work okay uh there's there was a question that came up actually during the Nike breakdown okay I thought it was an interesting one and it was the bridge between uh UI and ux where you were showing the wireframes and you said that this was UI and then eventually you know the rest made sense to me I guess one one question that came out from somebody from Russia I believe I can't I can't read the the type there but you know why why is the wireframe UI and not ux gotcha gotcha so let's talk about definition here wireframes and prototypes and user interfaces are different things so wireframes is laying out the user flow the information architecture and you're not using any typography you're not planning on any visual interaction and it's it's just it's a very beginning step so what we're looking at is the actual user interface the only thing that we did was throw in images and throw in copy so when you are a user interface designer what I showed you in the beginning that that really Stark thing with all the FPL images that's what you create that's what user interface design is now obviously all these things like that Venn diagram they kind of mesh together so a lot of the disciplines kind of they go back and forth and they share a lot of tools and resources and process so a UI designer is totally able to encourage or direct the photography style and things like that but in terms of strict definition the UI is kind of what I showed you in the beginning does that answer that question in your mind it does I mean I it does that makes sense okay and I guess the part that I'm struggling to answer within my head within your answer is so where does ux end uh like you know what I mean like you you could Define all that stuff you can you get that one side you had was more holistic approach right the audio the sound the physical thing how does that manifest itself like what does that look like in in the engagement when you're working with a client you know because I I understand the visual part it's really easy to show the visual part yeah how does the ux part get represented in all of this and how does that get defined in the process so it starts with um Discovery and those two Cornerstone questions are an easy way to kind of go about answering that question so our two Cornerstone questions are you know what's going to make our user feel good right so answering that boom now you're talking about user experience then what variables can we control so in a website you know obviously we don't want to Loop in audio that plays automatically we know that that's a commonly accepted thing because we don't want to like bug our users out of using the site so it's like what variables can we control you know they're not going to get taste and touch out of a website unless you can control like the interface like apple does you know they control the hardware and the software right so you have to kind of outline that and then with the client you can move forward on things like okay we probably need to bring in an audio engineer we probably need to bring in somebody that's going to be able to design an audio interface and it's at the beginning of the engagement so ux designers kind of come in way at the top at a consultative level versus visual stuff which is farther down the line in the project you're right okay what else we got I think that's that's clear in my head uh everybody's freaking out because Chris is doing some pull-ups in the background but he's not continuous I gotta clear it up if he did like a hundred pull-ups I'd be uh yeah he's engineering things he's doing two and then walking away yeah we can do just one live session where it's all Chris doing pull-ups yeah we can really see how many he could do [Laughter] okay so here's here's an interesting question from Zahir almania okay uh or manla sorry uh from Facebook should the ux design totally be on the brand guidelines oh that is a great question I'm gonna have to think about that for a minute yeah because I mean you define the brand guidelines and you know it should be within certain confines that the brand should look sound and I guess taste their you know feel like all those senses and uh do you work within that uh brand definition as you're doing the user experience or do you are you avoid of that and you just look at the user themselves what are they doing what are they acting what do they need to get void of what the the brand Brands goals or Brands definition is so I'm gonna go with a with a really old metaphor um thinking outside of the box actually thinking inside the box so in my mind branding that tone of voice the you know all that stuff that you establish in a branding Endeavor that should build your box right and it should be a massive box and so the tone should be very broad it should include a little bit of flexibility in the case of you know you have two very different users that are going to be using the product service or brand right so um within that box there should be several different user experiences especially for companies that exist both digitally and physically I'm hoping that that answered the question yeah I mean I think we could go on and on about that but in in my mind those things should be aligned oh yeah not necessarily like you're working within a box but those things should be aligned meaning the the brand the business has a particular set of goals the user has a very particular set of goals those things at the end of the day should be aligned yeah right so everybody's getting what they want and that's where you come in as a true designer being able to align all those parties all their needs and deliver uh an experience deliver a visual um experience that aligns yeah another caveat is we're looking at um a lot of client interaction there's a lot of questions about clients but user experience can happen outside of client work and you have to think people that design digital products you know if you're working inside of a company that is maybe you're an app or something like that that brand and stuff that's that's flexible according to the user and so is the business goal everything depends on the on that user and their experience so it can actually differ when when you're looking at you know in-house people um you know Twitter is a great example they they totally did not start out as this 140 character messaging kind of thing it was a totally different business goal it was a totally different functionality and they've they've just pivoted over the years I mean I think you have to do that as a brand you have to be flexible you can't just be locked into what you started on day one yeah otherwise you'll sink as the world evolves around you right and your competitors grow steal your ideas and then become better than you you kind of have to change right and part of that is just understanding what your current user base what their needs are and you know projecting a little bit and trying to accommodate that as you move forward and evolve as a brand as an experience right and it's like you know if you design this hyper modern hipster thing and all of a sudden you have 50 year old women showing up and buying the product does the experience need to change maybe maybe not depending on their feedback but you don't want to say I don't want those customers I don't want them I want like 20 year old dudes with mustaches and the wax tips you you roll with whatever your users are whoever's using the platform or buying your product uh there's one question it was a follow-up by uh Jacob Conrad and it was a follow-up to the value of user experience with him um the the engagement with your client okay um I guess he's bringing up when you're in the engagement with the client and you make recommendations saying like here I've looked at your user experience I've looked at your brand here recommendations that I would recommend tweaking and then the client kind of pushes that under the rug saying oh we can fix that later don't worry about that we can fix that later and maybe they're coming the client's coming from a position like well I don't want to pay for that thing like I want you to do this thing how do you overcome that or how do you help convey what it is the value of doing the user experience which is all the thinking and figuring all the rough stuff up front versus now that everything's gone eight weeks into production and you're launching it's like oh well this doesn't really work how do you how do you navigate around that bin data it's a big scary thing for designers um but data is the key remember ux design is is a scientific process it's a series of ideating iterating and validating excuse me ideating validating and iterating one of those it's an idea look that up but you know in that series you're basically hypothesizing something's going to happen then you're executing then you're testing that hypothesis and the results and then you're going to analyze what can we do develop a plan and then start that cycle all over again and so in that you should have data so if you're approaching the situation and saying you know I don't think that that color is going to do it a business person is just going to hear that want designer speak so you really have to back these things up with data and experiment and test that's crucial remember iteration is one of the key requirements to be a user experience designer any other questions or are we kind of fizzling out everybody's like brain is exploding no everybody's uh the chat on YouTube especially is all fired up about Chris working out and I'm trying to sort between all these uh questions coming in the the juicy ones uh Bjorn asks where in the process of branding do you say that ux comes into play oh branding and user experience are different things and so you know in branding the process they look similar right you do user profiles and all that kind of stuff but branding is a different Beast um it's it's kind of like if you looked at branding and user experience on a Venn diagram it would be equal circles that kind of intersect a little bit and so a branding engagement would be totally separate from user experience right but there are things that would uh I guess what what carries over in there well things like user profiles the tone of voice that kind of stuff but when you're looking at a branding exercise you are kind of aligning that to the users but you also want to help the brand communicate who they think that they are and so it's just a different mindset it's a different approach do you think there are instances and occasions where those Venn diagrams cross over a lot more in The Branding in The Branding world like what what are you thinking uh I'm thinking okay a digital product like Netflix for instance right it's heavy on user experience it has to be right otherwise they're going to fall to their competitors so they're constantly iterating testing a b testing making sure that experience is great so that's heavy user experience I know they've been out for a long time now but then they've also have a had a brand that's uh evolved for a long time let's say if they were rebranding Netflix today which I think they did just a few years ago yeah um don't you think part of that the user experience process heavily influences the The Branding aspect of it or do you in your mind are those Venn diagrams still pretty far apart no I I guess you're right I mean they kind of they kind of come together they move they move separately um the thing about branding is that you're branding an entire company so the the impact the influence is massive right whereas user experience branding May kind of use that same user experience principle of a user-centric approach to the design but then the user experiences can get smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller right as you go through I mean it could be the app as a whole which is a company or it can be a mailer that they send to press to announce a new show so it's just like that that expanding Circle you know branding is like this big thing user experience can be that big or tiny right okay that that makes more sense to me and I think we covered that a little bit earlier where The Branding is a much larger picture of everything where the ux can get very granular so looking at the Netflix experience for instance on the broad scale what it is it's it's for users who want to escape in an endless stream of content right that's constantly being fed to them but if you look at the user experience the the granular aspects are well now that you watched an episode what's next right what's recommended to you things like that so that's more on the user experience side so there are some shared things but I think it's broad versus granular parts of of the whole experience totally agree okay totally agree better than that just stepping in here um look at this guy all sweaty um people want to get a little preview of The Next Episode and I think you guys should do some straight up Facebook and YouTube questions that's what we've been doing no like you should open it up and look at them scan because you'll see things oh I mean take out this Library well wait show them a little preview just real quickly so there's no preview oh there's no preview let me talk about the briefing there okay so next time we're gonna just we're gonna talk about like the user experience design process the steps that you take the Tactical steps that you take to run a ux engagement both on the client side and on the product side we're going to start focusing on digital because that's where user experience kind of lives and it's it's nice and cozy there um but we're gonna we're gonna kind of approach the process a little bit differently why was it important for you to have this common definition why start here why does one begin here because everybody wants to get running right we always talk about how designers want to just hit the ground and start making stuff real fast you're very deliberate and intentional why you did it yeah right well I think I think I talked about it earlier you know there was no there's no we have to use the same language when we talk about things and so I see a lot of designers that actually use the words ux designer in their portfolio or something and I actually had a call with one that said oh man I can't get a job because I I don't know I say I'm a user experience designer and I asked her are you a user experience designer or are you a user interface designer and I think it's because it's this like ux is a sexy term and everybody's like oh man ux designer that's sweet but um if you're a user interface designer that's just a sexy thing you can do that's totally fine to call yourself great I like that I think there are probably like three buzzwords that everybody talks about in the space one is ux yep the next one is branding yep the last one is design thinking Yep this one right in front of us oh okay here we go and the last one is design thinking these are terms that are used a lot now and there's a lot of power Behind these words but you know how I feel about the word branding a lot of people say they do branding but they don't do branding at all yeah right exactly and I feel the same way about ux design and it's one of those things if you have ux design in your portfolio I want to see your data show me the data um in those case studies maybe show the iterative process that you're talking about here's what we launched with and here's what it looked like a month later and then six months later it got to be this really polished experience where they got that actual desired emotion you're talking about yep and I don't want to just sweep the whole audio thing under the rug as you just missed it like that really guys what does that mean there's three key things you need to know about user experience design one is you need to come up with an idea and that's id8 and before you can actually ideate you have to kind of do a little profiling you have to understand who are you building this thing for yeah discover that's all part of the discovery process and we go deep into it in the core kit and we explain exactly how to do it and then once you have that kind of you formulate some kind of insights and you know who your users are you're going to try something out yeah this is your best guess and it's an educated guess okay it's not just a wild ass guess yep two is you really need to validate you need to make sure that what you think it's going to do is actually doing what it is so you can look at heat maps you can look at conversion you can interview God I mean flow from Google analytics you can interview people that's called uh what is it called focus groups you can bring people in you can have them look at it you have cameras on them you can ask them questions afterwards I forget the the name of the startup but there's this uh startup that wanted to deliver groceries and so what they did was they went to yeah I don't think it's Amazon it was like a grocery specific thing it could be Amazon but I don't think it is they went to the grocery store and they stood outside the store and they asked people hey do next time do you want us to deliver your groceries um ux design you're testing the business concept you're testing that experience you're testing like what they're going to trust are they going to trust the dude outside of the store they ask follow-up questions like how do you want to do this that's a little dangerous what Ben is talking about is just one specific aspect of the the user experience design right because basically then you're saying anybody that goes out and asks a question is doing user experience they are taking part of the process that's a part of the process and what we're talking about is to validate right and the last thing is once you validate you make controlled experiments you a B test lots of things there are lots of companies out there that make little things that sit on top of your site to change the color of a button or to move it or to make it a different font or to try one image of a woman and an image of a man and then you change and you keep testing everything until you get that exp