I’ve been asked what a UX designer does for the past 4 years, so I decided to list out the answer to “but what does that mean?”

• we work with project managers, researchers and engineers to figure out what users need and why
• we figure out what how and where users can access what they need by sketching, wireframing, listening
• we drink a lot of coffee
• we design interaction patterns that work with the target platform, product, branding, etc
• we prototype these patterns and test them for usability issues
• we iterate and fix problems
• we drink some tea
• we work with engineers to implement designs through assets, style guides
• if we work at a large org, we work with lawyers, writers, visual designers, directors, designers on other teams, ux engineers, production designers, translators, accessibility-experts and program managers to make sure our work is aligned with everything else
• if we work at a startup, (mostly likely) we are the researcher, the designer, the prototyper, the project manager and, occasionally, even the engineer
• we look at everything for inspiration – design blogs, architecture, mechanical objects, fashion, app stores and bookmark what we find in our brains or in a folder somewhere
• we occasionally can’t think of good blog post topics and end up blogging about this