The Common Misconceptions About UX Design
UX design shows up in job postings, project briefs, and portfolios alike. As familiar as the term is, it is just as often misunderstood — so we start from two of its most common misconceptions and look again.
UX design (user experience design).
It is a term so familiar and so widely used that we hardly think twice about it. We encounter it routinely — in job postings, in project briefs, in design portfolios. And that very familiarity leads us to assume we already understand the term and the concept behind it.
Yet the moment you look a little closer, UX design turns out to be a field riddled with misunderstandings about its own terminology and concept. As project after project has been carried out on top of this incomplete understanding, the misconceptions have hardened into convention and been reproduced, rather than corrected.
Even among those we broadly call “experts,” the situation is not much different. Some define UX design loosely as simply “thinking about the user’s experience,” while others assume that once the deliverables of a UX method — a persona, a scenario — are produced, the UX design process has been completed.
These two views seem unrelated at first glance, but they happen to sit at opposite extremes of the most representative misconception about UX design. One draws the boundaries of UX design so wide that it becomes indistinguishable from virtually any act of design; the other draws them so narrow that it reduces UX design to the production of a particular deliverable. The broad misconception dilutes UX design’s identity; the narrow one confines its spirit within form.
The essence of UX design lies somewhere between these two extremes. To find it, let’s first look at where each misconception comes from.
Misconception 1: “Design that thinks about the user’s experience”
To say that UX design “thinks about the user’s experience” is not wrong. It is just too broad. After all, it is rather rare for design of any kind not to consider the user’s experience.
From the earliest days of industrial design, designers have thought about forms that fit the hand of the person using the product, colors that appeal to the eye, proportions that suit everyday life. The person designing a chair thought about the comfort of whoever would sit in it; the person designing a poster considered how the viewer’s gaze would move. If this is not thinking about the user’s experience, what is? Follow this line of reasoning and you end up with the equation “design = UX design” — at which point there is no way to explain why we bother attaching the “UX” qualifier and separating it out as its own domain at all.
But the very fact that the term and concept of UX design were created and are used separately is itself evidence that something clearly distinguishes it from design as it was. To pin down that “something,” we need to go beyond the sweeping declaration of “considering the user” and define more precisely in what way, and at what depth, UX design deals with the user’s experience.
Misconception 2: “Design that uses UX design methods”
At the opposite end of the broad definition sits a view that tries to define UX design by its methods — that is, by the form of the deliverables produced through UX design methodology. This one, conversely, is too narrow.
A methodology is, quite literally, a tool. We may infer the purpose a tool serves from the tool itself, but to equate the tool with the purpose is a plain error. It is the same reason we cannot define the essence of design as marker rendering or Photoshop editing simply because we use markers or Photoshop while designing. Just as handling a marker skillfully amounts to nothing more than a coloring technique without formative thinking behind it, UX design methodology, too, takes on meaning only when the concept and spirit of UX design run through it.
This danger becomes reality on the ground more often than you would think. Writing a persona document does not mean you have understood the user, and deriving a scenario does not mean you have designed an experience. If these methods are carried out mechanically, without the fundamental questions of UX design — why does this user behave this way, what shapes the experience in this context — then they are nothing but an empty shell that has borrowed only the form.
Conversely, if you can empathize deeply with the user’s cognitive structure and behavioral patterns and reflect that consistently in your design decisions — even without any fixed method or format — that is precisely what it means to take a UX design approach.
So What Is UX Design?
We have looked at two misconceptions. Define it too broadly and UX design dissolves into all of design, losing any meaning of its own; define it too narrowly and it shrinks to the performance of a particular method. So how, exactly, can UX design be defined?
It would be nice to answer that question cleanly in a single sentence, but a hasty one-liner can become the seed of yet another misconception. So rather than offering one clear-cut definition, this series proposes the journey of arriving at the answer itself. We will work through it one step at a time: the era and the problems out of which UX design emerged, how it declared itself distinct from the existing design tradition, and how the “experience” it centers on is formed within the human mind and can be deliberately shaped.
This journey runs along three broad currents. First, we look at why the declaration of UX design was necessary, within its historical context. Next, we go into the fundamental principles that make up experience — understanding how the user’s cognition works, by what mechanism behavior takes shape, and how emotion influences judgment. Finally, building on that understanding, we cover the procedures and tools for observing, analyzing, and designing the user’s experience in an actual design process.
What this series ultimately wants to talk about is not tools but perspective, not technique but spirit. Concrete tools and techniques will of course appear along the way, but they are only the channels through which perspective and spirit are realized — never ends in themselves. Understanding why a tool is needed before learning it, and knowing what a method is trying to capture before applying it — this is the order of learning UX design that this series proposes.
In the next post, as the starting point of this journey, we trace from the history of design itself just what era and circumstances gave rise to UX design as a “declaration.”