In this five-part guide, we’re exploring how Experience Design has evolved, where it’s at risk of losing sight of the human, and why it’s still crucial in helping organisations design experiences that genuinely work for people in increasingly complex digital environments.
In chapter two, we looked at the most common pitfalls organisations fall into when building digital experiences and how to overcome them.
In this chapter, we dig into the core disciplines that sit under the Experience Design (XD) umbrella, from user research and UX to accessibility, analytics, design systems and collaboration. We look at what each discipline contributes, where AI can support the work being done, and why these elements are most powerful when they operate together rather than in silos.
Experience Design isn’t a single discipline. It’s the amalgamation of several; all focused on one outcome: delivering a better experience to human users.
Each discipline provides a separate piece of the puzzle. Useful individually but most powerful when they come together to create the full picture. Combined, they help teams design experiences that are engaging, usable and aligned with real human needs.
So, let’s take a closer look at each discipline, what it contributes and how it fits into the wider practice of experience design.
Experience Design
Often (incorrectly) mistaken for UX design, Experience Design considers how a (digital) touchpoint fits into the wider customer experience provided by the brand or organisation.
User Experience (UX) Design
UX design focuses on a specific digital touchpoint, like and app, website or Kiosk.
It provides the structure for digital experiences so they are intuitive, accessible and easy to use. The process includes defining user journeys, interaction patterns and information architecture.
User & sector research
User research allows you to understand user behaviours, needs and motivations through interviews, observation, testing and data analysis.
Without it, you won’t know the exact user problems that need to be solved, and end up basing decisions on guesswork or assumptions, or just because you like the way it looks. Designing without user research often means relying on assumptions which can lead to solutions that don’t fully meet user needs.
While some UX practitioners possess significant sector expertise, the nature of agency work often means working in entirely new industries. So, alongside user research, experience design professionals will often conduct desk research and rapid sector immersion, using AI tools where appropriate, to get a better understanding of an organisation’s market, competitors, regulations or behaviours to support design decisions and how they approach user research. We find that UX experience across different industries is valuable for identifying opportunities to adapt successful solutions or patterns from one sector to another.
Usability testing
Where user research helps uncover user need, usability testing uncovers whether the proposed solution (or existing experience) meets its requirements. It’s one of the main validation tools that ensures design decisions work for real people and helps organisations land on the best solution for their and their users’ needs. We treat usability testing as a crucial feedback loop, allowing us to observe real people using the product to see what works, what doesn’t and why. By watching users attempt real tasks, our team can spot confusion or friction that might otherwise go unnoticed, then iterate on the design to fix those issues.
Usability testing is often carried out on high-fidelity design prototypes (created in the UX/UI phases of a project). These experiences feel ‘real’ but offer increased flexibility over coded prototypes as they can be tweaked and updated rapidly. See more on prototyping below.
Information architecture and design systems
In practice, a strong information architecture (the way content is structured and labelled) works hand-in-hand with a design system, aligning the product with users’ mental models so information is easy to find. Design systems connect UI design, interaction design and accessibility into a consistent, maintainable foundation. They also help product teams move faster with shared patterns.
Design systems are a great way to enable organisations to quickly and easily maintain brand consistency across digital touchpoints and when building new sites or updating and existing asset.
See our Reckitt case study for an example, where a global design system boosted consistency and speed across multiple brand sites.
Analytics and expert reviews
Analytics and expert reviews together can be a powerful combination. Analytics augment and can pinpoint anomalies in user behaviour at scale, while expert reviews and audits (heuristic evaluations) can hypothesise on the cause quickly and efficiently. Together they help diagnose problems and prioritise opportunities.
Analytics help identify the ‘what’ – where there’s a sticking point in the journey, or something’s just not working - while a heuristic evaluation using well-established usability principles (such as clarity, consistency, and feedback) pits the digital experience against established usability principles to identify where there may be issues.
UI, interaction and visual design
Where visual design in a broader design discipline encompassing the overall design of the experience, including colour, imagery, logos, typography, layout, shapes, and space, UI (user interface design) focuses more on the ‘interface’ of the digital product – the screens, buttons, and interactive elements used to navigate the digital experience.
Closely linked with UI design, interaction design then defines how an interactive element responds when triggered and the flow between elements of the user interface. It adds the dimension of behaviour. It’s about what happens when you click or tap. Does a button press give immediate feedback (like changing colour or showing a loading spinner)? Does the transition from one screen to the next feel smooth? Good interaction design follows HCI principles of feedback and consistency, so each action a user takes feels natural and reassuring.
Rapid prototyping and ideation
Digital prototypes help us to test-drive ideas in a fast, safe, and cost-effective way and are a critical business tool for driving innovation. They provide a product with which to conduct usability testing, gather data and validate product requirements before committing to a design. They’re also a great tool to bring a business plan to life and get internal buy-in for digital projects. We’ve found that even a low-fidelity prototype can spark invaluable feedback. Stakeholders and users can interact with a concept, which often surfaces insights that wouldn’t appear in theory or meetings.
New AI tools allow us to creatively concept, visualise and bring our initial ideas to life much quicker than before, which helps us to bring more fleshed out options to the table to discuss internally and with project owners. See more on how AI is impacting our disciplines below.
Accessible design
It’s important that digital experiences are designed for everyone – which means consideration of users with alternative accessibility needs. Part of XD’s remit is ensuring that digital interfaces and designs can be easily understood and navigated by everyone, including those who rely on assistive technology.
Collaboration & QA
Collaboration is a critical part of XD to ensure the final product functions as expected. Key collaboration moments occur in the handoff between the design team and developers as the various components, design libraries, patterns and elements that make up a design are built or re-built correctly.
QA then ensures that everything functions as intended, that the components function correctly, pages behave consistently, accessibility standards are met and user journeys flow as intended.
How AI is impacting these disciplines
AI is starting to show up across all areas of experience design, with its strength lying in its ability to support the work being done by people, speeding up early tasks and giving people more room to explore new ideas and test new concepts.
In research, AI can help summarise what people said or spot early patterns. In design, it can generate quick variations, layouts and more recently full design systems. In prototyping, AI can build out early flows and ideas faster and in accessibility, AI can flag technical issues.
Across the board, AI makes parts of the process quicker, but the governance of this and high-quality output still comes from people. Human insight, good judgement and real testing remain at the heart of effective experience design.
As the above highlights, while each of these disciplines plays a different role, together they deliver to a single outcome. They help teams understand people, design with intention and build products that work in the real world. And none of this can happen in isolation. Experience Design is at its best when insight flows across teams and every step feeds seamlessly into the next.
Research uncovers the problems, UX design shapes the structure, visual and UI design bring it to life, prototyping helps test ideas safely, accessibility ensures no one is excluded and collaboration with wider teams helps turn concepts into reality and protect the integrity of the experience.
Together, they ensure that every decision, from the earliest idea to the moment a product goes live, is rooted in what users need.
Knowing the disciplines is one thing. Knowing how to apply them consistently and effectively is another.
In chapter 4, we’ll show what this looks like in practice by outlining Inviqa’s approach to Experience Design, from research and immersion through to design systems, optimisation and long-term partnership.
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