AMA: The UX Umbrella

Josh Walz, Associate Director of UX, ZoCo Design

I always talk about UX in terms of: it’s an umbrella. Other people will talk about it as a Venn diagram. They are similar concepts.

What is underneath that UX umbrella?

There’s so many things that are underneath that UX umbrella.

• User interface (UI)
• Architecture
• Utility
• Technical & dev.
• And more

When we think about what it contains, there’s user interface (UI). There’s what I prefer to call the architectural part of user experience, which is figuring out pathways, figuring out how the user or an individual is going to get from A to B in an experience.

There is the utility work of the experience – the parts it must have in order for it to work. There’s the technical pieces of it and understanding how it’s technically going to get created [including development].

In a lot of ways, user experience and customer experience (CX) are also very intertwined. But all of these things [including CX] are either fully under user experience, adjacent to it, or overlapping it some way like in a Venn diagram. [These various disciplines] are all closely related and intertwined in that way.

User experience is the holistic experience that an individual, a person, or a group has when they’re interacting with your product, service, or offering in some way.