My mission this month is to get more designers (or aspiring designers) started in User Experience design. The best place to start any education is at the beginning:

What is UX?

Everything has a user experience. Our job is not to create the user experience. It is our job to make it good.

And what do I mean by “good” user experience?

It is common to think that a good user experience is one that makes users happy. Not true! If happiness was our only goal, we could just throw in some Lolcats and random compliments and go home. But — although that’s not the worst universe I can imagine — your boss may not be satisfied with the results.

The goal of a UX designer is to make users effective.

A user’s experience is just the tip of the iceberg:

Many people mistakenly think that “UX” means a user’s experience, but it is actually about “doing” the process of User Experience Design.

A user’s individual experience is their conscious, subjective opinion of your app or site. User feedback is important — sometimes — but UX designers need to do a lot more than that.

“Doing” UX:

UX Design (also sometimes called UXD) involves a process very similar to doing science: we do research to understand the users, we develop ideas to solve the users’ needs — and the needs of the business — and we build and measure those solutions in the real world to see if they work.

You will learn about all of that this month. Or if that’s not your deal, Lolcats are still an option.

Tomorrow we’ll learn about the two types of UX goals that should change everything you design…