What Is User Experience Design (UXD)?

UXD is like a designer's very own personal assistant that you would love. It's there to help you ensure that what you're designing will be helpful for the end user, and it will go through the product with a fine-toothed comb to ensure everything works well and looks good. User experience design (UXD or UED) is the idea of designing software products and systems to be helpful to a set of end-users. It is a broad-level concept that is applied during the design process. It covers the technical use of a product or service, its essential physical interface, or how humans encounter the technology in the field. The idea behind UXD is that everyone should be able to use what you create without any trouble and without having to learn anything new! You want them to pick up your product like an old friend, not like something they've never seen before. It's easy to think of the user interface as straightforward, a screen, a keyboard and mouse, and some buttons. Yet, looking at how the user interface has evolved over the years, you'll see that it's a pretty dynamic field. The standard user interface started in the 1950s with mainframe computers controlled by alphanumeric keyboards. The technology quickly evolved into small-screen devices that used a touchscreen interface, but only for about ten years before being replaced by voice-controlled technology that could answer questions about anything from weather reports to world news. Since then, we've seen three-dimensional virtual reality interfaces come onto the scene (with Microsoft HoloLens) and wearable devices such as Google Glass and Apple Watch. So in just the last few months, we've seen new advances in this field, bendable touchscreen interfaces and 3D physical control panels (like bendable TVs).