What Does a UX Designer Do? How To Develop UX Design Skills

We’ve all been there: You’re shopping online, but can’t easily click between images. You want to read an article, but there are endless pop-ups in the way. You’re scanning for event information for a cool upcoming concert, but the web page layout is leaving you totally lost. These are examples of poor user experience (UX) design.

As users, we encounter experiences UX designers created for us every day. The best UX design goes unnoticed because of its seamless user flow—the result of extensive usability testing and UX research. A UX designer is behind those resulting delightful experiences.

Learn more about what UX designers do and how they create seamless experiences online.

What is UX design?

User experience encompasses a wide range of small interactions that make up a user’s larger experience with a digital product—typically a website, landing page, or app. UX design considers the hierarchy of information, user expectations, user journey, and visual elements. For example, determining where a call-to-action button is on a mobile app, what it looks like, and where it takes a user. Also, the way a menu is organized, the order in which a user sees key information, and how easy it is to enter payment or contact information.

Overall, the goal of UX design is to move the user through the entire user journey with engaging, intuitive interactions and as little friction as possible. UX designers do this by drawing on a wide variety of disciplines, including visual design, psychology, web development, product design, marketing, and information architecture.

UX design vs UI design vs graphic design 

In the world of product design, every kind of designer is prioritizing user experience, but different design disciplines support that journey in different ways. User interface (UI) design, also known as interaction design, is a component of UX design that focuses specifically on the design and presentation of the interface. UI designers often apply graphic design principles such as branding, typography, and color theory to facilitate a pleasant and intuitive user experience.

Although the way things look and feel is certainly part of UX design, UI designers and graphic designers are the ones who spend more time curating or creating fonts, colors, and imagery that are visually pleasing and aligned with brand guidelines. For example, a UX designer might create wireframes to capture the ideal user journey from a landing page, a UI designer imagines how the visual elements in the wireframe will actually appear, and a graphic designer creates the visual assets that make the user interface design feel like a cohesive part of the brand.

What do UX designers do?

1. Conduct user research
2. Build information architecture
3. Design wireframes and build prototypes
4. Conduct user testing
5. Collaborate with other departments

A UX designer’s role and exact responsibilities will depend on the company and the makeup of the team they’re a part of. At Shopify, designers wear many hats, says senior product designer Kaitlyn Horch, whose role includes both product design and visual design. A good UX designer will be thinking about the way a user interacts with a product on all levels and pitching in wherever necessary to give the user a great experience. But by and large, user experience designers tend to do the following:

1. Conduct user research

User research is one cornerstone of a UX designer’s job. Only through gathering and interviewing real users and analyzing user behavior are companies able to gain a competitive edge. Without user research, a new product might fall short of what people in the real world actually need, decreasing their likelihood of using the product again. Unlike user testing, user research usually happens before the start of a project. Whether that’s creating an entirely new product, updating a feature, or adding a new element to an existing product, user research is a tool to understand users’ needs in the real world. There are multiple ways to collect user feedback:

• Interviews. Asking real users questions about their needs, preferences, and pain points to understand what’s working and what’s not.

• Observation. Observe people in everyday life or while using a similar or competitive product to learn about natural user behavior. 

• Surveys. You can design a set of survey questions to collect feedback from a representative sample of users.

2. Build information architecture

Information architecture includes site organization and mapping, as well as product labeling. While this might be primarily handled by content designers, UX designers play a major role in deciding what information architecture will lead to a high conversion rate. There are also visual considerations UX designers weigh in on, such as information hierarchy on a page, accompanying visuals, and the order in which the user experiences different elements within a digital product.

3. Design wireframes and build prototypes

Wireframes and prototypes are essential UX design tools. They allow designers to anticipate issues, debug user flows, test products, and iterate. When thinking through design solutions for a problem identified in their research, UX designers start by building wireframes, the building blocks of interaction design. Wireframes are blueprints for how a page, app, or feature might function and help the design team visualize the user flow before they dig into details like user interface design or copy.

Prototyping is another key part of the UX design process. Using prototyping tools like Figma or Framer, UX designers mimic the way a digital product will actually function—no coding skills needed.

4. Conduct user testing

Whether it’s using a wireframe, prototype, or an existing product, user testing is a crucial part of a UX designer’s job. While user research can be open-ended and exploratory and usually takes place at the beginning of a project, user testing aims to solve a specific problem or test a hypothesis for an existing product. User testing generally falls into two buckets: qualitative and quantitative.

Qualitative types of user testing include:

• Observation. Asking users to complete tasks and report points of friction or other feedback about their experiences to live observers.

• Interviews. Contacting and interviewing users about their experience using a product.

Quantitative types of user testing include:

• A/B testing. In A/B testing, users are shown two options, and companies track their behavior to understand which option performs better. 

• Analytics. UX designers can use tools to identify user behavior on a web page, then analyze where users clicked, how long they stayed on a page, or how long they scrolled. That helps them determine whether the user is taking the desired action.

UX designers work alongside UX researchers to analyze test results and use this data to inform their decisions.

5. Collaborate with other departments

UX design is inextricable from the other pillars of product development. Kaitlyn explains there are two approaches to creating a product. The first is what she calls the “waterfall” approach, in which each department works separately on the product, then passes it off to the next department. The second is a collaborative approach, which Kaitlyn uses in her work.

In the collaborative approach, every department works together on the product at the same time in different capacities. When the Shopify design team was redesigning the app store, Kaitlyn remembers having daily stand-up meetings with the entire team to assess progress and assign tasks. “A lot of the developers have really great input on what the solution could be,” Kaitlyn says. “Everyone having a seat at the table is really important in the collaborative approach.”

Skills needed to become a UX designer 

A UX designer is at the intersection of multiple disciplines; there are several (seemingly antithetical) areas where they should shine. Whether you’re hiring a UX designer or considering a career as one, here’s what you need to know about the required skills:

• Visual communication. A good UX designer thinks visually. They can see how the architecture of a product fits together—and also where it might start to fall apart. They should also have strong presentation skills and be able to take internal stakeholders through their design thinking process. 

• Critical thinking. A UX designer should think analytically to make decisions, using research, data, and the process of elimination to work through problems and present possible paths forward. They should also be able to zoom out and look at the data as part of a larger picture—their own human experience and the goals of the organization—to balance their decision-making.

• Empathy. Interfacing with team members and users is a huge part of a UX designer’s day. That’s why effective communication skills like understanding, empathy, and clarity are essential for any UX designer.

• Technical skills. A UX designer should also have a strong command of industry best practices and digital tools like Figma, Framer, UXCam, Marvel, UXPin, and more. Coding skills are useful though not required.

AI and UX design

Artificial intelligence (AI) is impacting the field of UX as well. New tools make UX workflows more efficient and reduce the workload for UX designers. For example, while UX designers once needed to have a baseline knowledge of software development, AI tools are beginning to code.

But what’s harder for AI to replicate, Kaitlyn says, is taste. “UX designers are going to have to be really good at taste and understanding what ‘good’ looks like,” she says, “because you can dictate something to an AI model, but you have to be able to look at that and understand how to make it 10 times better.”

AI also has the potential to directly benefit end users. In the emerging concept of generative UI, AI tools present custom interfaces to different users based on their preferences. Right now, the vast majority of users see the same interface, and UX/UI design aims to account for the needs of the average user. But generative UI will account for the needs of each user individually. UX/UI designers will need to adapt to this shift to individualized design. 

Why does your business need a UX designer?

UX design is a design process that negotiates the needs of the consumer with the needs of the business to enhance user experience and generate results for the business. Researchers at the Nielsen Norman Group found user-centered design can increase conversions (the number of users who take the action your business wants them to take) by up to 83%, and UX designers lead the charge. They conduct user research, create user journey maps, and define user personas, finding creative solutions that meet user needs. Ultimately, a successful UX designer makes the business more successful, too.

Kaitlyn says improving the lives of small business owners is what drives her work as a designer. “Every decision that I’m making and every design that I’m doing,” she says, “is, at the end, going to help someone run their business much smoother, save them time, make them more money, and give them more freedom to do the things that they actually want to do.”