What Is Design?

I started working in digital user experience design back in 2014. “Digital user experience” can encapsulate any number of skillsets: front end development, web design, graphic design, English, business, and so on. For me, I focused on information architecture, taxonomy structure, navigation, user research, and wireframing for apps and websites.

At the time, user experience was nascent in terms of popular understanding, though at that time the term had been around for 20 years. Working at digital agencies, much of my time was spent explaining (justifying) the value of user experience to our clients. The idea of taking time out to think about things like website structure or to create basic digital blueprints called wireframes—let alone to seek feedback from actual customers on their experience with our clients’ existing digital offerings—was regularly called into question, if not outright dismissed as a luxury. All they wanted was the output: they wanted screens. If you’re a designer, that’s what you do. You create pretties that get coded. Right?

As I sit here, the last weeks of 2025 before us, I am baffled to see that we are in a place that feels far too familiar to that 2014 world. In a meeting recently, a coworker relayed that some leaders within our division were asking “why we have so many designers.” (Our design team is about 3% of the org.) This is certainly not the first time I’ve heard a question like this, which I mean not as a way to demonstrate my experience, but more as a way to demonstrate my utter and complete exhaustion from questions like these.

Lest you fear I’ll spend the remainder of this spouting off grievances and blaming everyone around me for the plights of design, rest assured: I will only do that some. Truthfully, design as a discipline—and particularly those of us within user experience—has struggled to demonstrate our value to the same types of business leaders who question our existence. Perhaps this is due in part to the fact that not everything can be macerated through the juicer of ROI calculations, but I also think it’s because we in UX have not yet hit the nail on the head when explaining our value.

So, I’m going to give this a try. I will not satisfy everyone. That’s fine. I’ve been in this industry long enough (oh and also just a human in the world long enough) to know that it is folly to aim to prove with 100% certainty that something is worthwhile, even when I believe it to my core. Join me for this, take away what you want, and then, you know, step away from your computer and look off into the middle distance. It’s really good for your eyes.

User Experience is Psychology

At its purest core, UX is the application of psychology as a means to engage digital (or physical) things with people in the best possible ways. Said another way, if we do not understand human behavior, we will fail to create something humans want to use. Any number of psychological concepts are well-worn within UX and drive our decision making process: Miller’s Law, serial position effect, cognitive load, Gestalt principles, Hick’s Law, motivation techniques, persuasion techniques, and on and on.

User Experience is Education

Imagine a book with no capital letters, periods, commas, quotation marks, paragraph indentations, page numbers. No table of contents, no index or glossary. Now, give that book to a person and tell them to figure out where in that book the protagonist experiences their inciting incident. If you’re familiar with the narrative form, you may be able to deduce that it would be somewhere between the beginning and the middle of the book. But you’d have to search page by page by page in order to find it…or to think you’ve found it.

Now! Apply the same idea to a website or app. No navigation, no buttons, no affordances, no feedback, no loading state, no hover state, no click state, no search. Find what you’re looking for!

A product succeeds only as far as our ability to educate users how to work with it. Introducing concepts through progressive disclosure, designing copy and text based on our understanding of reading and comprehension, selecting colors based on color theory and accessibility needs—user experience takes all we know about how people learn and lays it out in a way where, if done properly, feels almost invisible to a user. Almost, dare I say, intuitive.

User Experience is the Presence of Ease and Comfort—or, the Absence of Terrible

This invisible nature is one of the reasons the value of UX can be so hard to identify. It is often only when it is NOT there that we notice, for all the wrong reasons, its impact. And we all know it, right? We know the sites or the apps or the digital tools that make us want to throw our phones across the room. The “submit” button on a long form is gray, leading us to believe it is disabled, even though we’ve correctly filled everything out. A shirt is sold out in our size, but the site doesn’t tell us that until we try to add it to our cart. An app gives us no indication that it has received our payment, even after we submitted our credit card information.

Think now of the times you’ve gone to a website, or downloaded an app, and you got from start to finish without a single hiccup. Every important piece of information was available when you needed it. The path to get from here to there was clearly lit and easily navigable. At the end, you accomplished your goal and solved whatever problem you set out to solve. What you must understand, I beg of you, is that this ease does not, did not, will not happen by accident. The path was carved and paved, the lights installed, the information presented, because a designer (and their team) made intentional choices to carve, pave, install, and present things exactly that way.

User Experience is Preventative Medicine

Is there any phrase more boring than “preventative medicine?” It immediately connotes that we have to (ugh) plan wisely now so that we don’t suffer later. But because we can’t see that suffering, because it may never exist at all, it’s far too easy to dismiss. Bye fam, gonna go smoke a bunch and exclusively eat Cheetos and just see what happens.

Then you wake up years down the line and see your doctor, and now there’s a situation—a situation that will require medications, physical therapy, surgery, constant checkups—that could have been avoided with (quelle horreur!) preventative medicine.

I know you’re smart enough to be picking up what I’m putting down: user experience is the same. It is preventative medicine. It’s the thing you do now so you don’t pay the (literal!!!) price down the line. I get it: sometimes things like discovery, user research, and analytics tracking feel dull and time-consuming and push out timelines. But maybe, just maybe, it’s worthwhile to push a timeline by a month* so that we don’t end up spending many months of employees’ time to go back, undo, and then aim to fix the mess that was made because a month seemed too long. That’s time and money that could be spent on improving existing features, or creating new ones. That’s time and money that could be used to further validate and solidify your value proposition, to further build engagement with users, to further increase usage of your digital tool.

User Experience is How We Want to Engage the World, How We Want to Engage With the World.

I acknowledge that my snark is getting out of hand, so let’s come back down. How do you want the world to see you? How do you want to present your company to your customers so that they put their trust, time, and money into what you give them? How do you want to show up for them, and how do you convey that to them? If your company has values, are you living those through your products? At the end of the day, user experience might present as screens in Figma, yes. But those screens came to life through the communication styles and values that your company chooses to embody every day.

Remember, we are all users experiencing something in every single moment. What you say, what you do, the judgments you make versus the curiosity you show, become part of the world you create for your employees, who then create the world for your customers. Questions like “why there are so many designers” is rife with judgment, and only one small step away from, “these people have no purpose.”

Go one step deeper. Acknowledge that there is a curiosity underneath the judgment. What do you want to understand about design? What is it that leads to your concern about design? And then—and this may be the most important part of everything I’ve written today—find a designer, ask them, and listen.

*If you are finding you regularly need more than a month, let’s connect at talk through how to make it less time consuming. It’s possible and the outcomes are still very much worthwhile!

Also, I want to take a moment to thank Scott Kubie as an influence on this article, the structure of which is loosely based off of his “What Even Is A Website” keynote from WIAD Des Moines, 2018.