This term was coined by Don Norman while he was Vice President of the Advanced Technology Group at Apple. In his own words: “I invented the term because I thought human interface and usability were too narrow. I wanted to cover all aspects of the person’s experience with the system including industrial design, graphics, the interface, the physical interaction, and the manual. Since then the term has spread widely, so much so that it is starting to lose it’s meaning… user experience, human centered design, usability; all those things, even affordances. They just sort of entered the vocabulary and no longer have any special meaning. People use them often without having any idea why, what the word means, its origin, history, or what it’s about.”
从这种层面上讲，用户体验设计（UX Design）在产品设计不同阶段或者不同背景下，就是：
- Information Architecture
- User Interface Deign
- Interaction Design
- Graphic Design
- Human Factors
- User Research
- Usability Testing
- Prototyping
- 等为了提高用户体验而采取的各种设计实践
为了取得更好的设计，设计师们所用的方法和实验是多种多样的，并且会涉及到不同学科知识，和多种领域的人进行合作，UX Designer 会参与到：
- Paticipatory Design
- Mood Board
- User Investigation
- Competitors Analysis
- Market and Brand Research
- Ethnographic Research
- Card Sorting
- Brainstorming
- Visual Design
- Information Architure Design
- Navigation Design
- Information Design
- Storyboarding
- Functional Specification Writing
- Styleguide Document Writing
- Usability Testing: Lab Testing
- Prototyping
- Drawing Wireframe, Mockups
- User Satisfaction Survey and Customer Feedbacks Analysis