Everything you need to know about experience design

Go back ten, twenty years ago, and the word “design” conjured up images of graphic designers, artists, architects — people concerned with solving problems in ways that looked nice.

Nowadays, the industry has exploded into a range of specialties, all of which have changed the way we think about the act of designing things. Now, rather than it being about solving problems, it’s about creating meaningful experiences.

Whether you’re planning a shop floor or building an app, you need to put the user at the heart of all your decisions and think about every interaction as one cohesive whole. This is what’s known as experience design, and it’s transforming the way we approach the design process.

So what is experience design?

Experience design is the act of designing products, services, or environments focusing on the quality of the user’s experience.

The idea of designing for user experience takes its bearings from a man named Don Norman, the first User Experience Architect at Apple. He also first coined the term, and from there, ‘design’ ballooned out into being a variety of things beyond just something to passively consume.

To really get to grips with the concept of experience design, it might be helpful to hone in on one word: experience.

Experience can mean all kinds of things, objective and subjective. In other words, it could be a journey or a sight, a building or a feeling. It could be something individual or shared — really, the possibilities are endless. However, when you add that word ‘design’ back in, you can see how the two work together as a concept.

Here are some key features of experience design:

• It’s not just digital
• Design is centered around the user experience
• It’s iterative
• It looks at every touchpoint a customer encounters on their journey.

Which digital design specialties count as experience design?

The short answer? Pretty much all of them. But, here are some of the digital design specialisms that are most commonly associated with experience design:

• Customer Experience (CX)
• User Experience (UX)
• UX Researcher
• UX Designer
• User Interface Designer
• UI Designer
• Visual Interface Designer
• UX Engineer.

Why is experience design on the rise?

The shift toward experience design isn’t just a matter of new terminology or people wanting fancy new job titles. It’s a reflection of how the design landscape has shifted.

The boundaries between roles have turned fuzzy. UX designers now do user research; product managers help define interaction patterns; and CX/UX teams increasingly overlap. In many organizations, experience design has coalesced under one banner that better captures this multi-skilled, user-centric approach.

This change is also a response to business pressures. Designers have grown tired of being pigeonholed as pixel-pushers or colour-pickers. Experience design highlights the strategic value of good design — not just how something looks, but how it works, feels, and how it serves people, and ultimately, converts.

It’s a name that places the emphasis where it belongs: on shaping the total experience, across every touchpoint.

What does experience design look like in action?

There’s no set route, but experience design — whether it’s for an app or an architectural diagram — follows four stages.

1. Discover: This is the research phase. Designers try to imagine the problem through their audience’s eyes and gather insights.
2. Define: Designers try to make sense of the information they’ve gathered to turn it into a solution to the problem they defined in Stage 1.
3. Develop: Designers begin brainstorming ideas, creating concepts, and evaluating each one.
4. Deliver: During this stage, designers start creating prototypes, which they’ll test using real users. After that, they’ll take their findings and iterate until they reach something that best meets their user’s needs.

Let’s expand on those.

Discover

During this phase, designers work to understand the needs and motives of their users. Here are some popular research methods:

• Brainstorming: The design team gathers together and shares ideas about the kinds of needs and problems their users might have.
• Qualitative research: Interviews and focus groups can help designers get under the skin of their users with in-depth personal responses. For best results, choose a mixture of people from within your target demographic. Since you’ll only have time and resources to interview a handful of people, make the range as wide as possible.
• Quantitative research: Mass surveys can be an effective way to gather lots of basic information quickly. They’re also cheap to do and analyze — though be sure to spend some time planning to make sure you’re asking the right questions.

Check out our guide to conducting user research for more tips.

Define

During this stage, designers need to make sense of all the data they gathered during the discovery phase, with the goal of turning it into something actionable. Here are some popular routes to achieving that:

• User personas: A user persona is a fictional character who represents your typical customer or user. It helps designers focus on a specific set of needs that has the broadest appeal to the majority of the group.
• Customer journey maps: A customer journey map plots the user’s route through their experience with your product, with every touchpoint marked up. This helps designers empathize with their needs each step of the way.

Develop

This stage is about getting down as many ideas as possible. Here are a couple of idea-generating exercises you can try as a team:

• Brainstorming: Designers gather in a room (or online via a cloud diagramming tool) and get down as many ideas as possible. At this stage, there’s no such thing as a bad idea: everything counts.
• Crazy Eights: Task designers with sketching eight ideas in eight minutes without any kind of filter. The goal is to break out of traditionally careful ways of thinking.

Deliver

The delivery stage is all about prototyping. Prototyping is an essential tool for testing out ideas and bringing designs to life early on while they’re at the low-fidelity stage. This helps designers learn more about how users interact with their product — findings they can then apply to the next stage. A big advantage of prototyping is that if you need to make changes or pivot, it’s far cheaper to do that if you hadn’t waited.

“If a picture is worth a thousand words, a prototype is worth a thousand meetings.” (Tom and David Kelly)

You can run prototypes throughout the entire design process. They can encompass the entire product or journey or a small portion of it. A wireframe is a type of prototype, as is an MVP, a render, and a mockup.

Prototypes:

• Help the team and stakeholders “get” concepts
• Give you feedback from real users
• Offer a way to test assumptions and refine the product

Here are some of the different types of prototypes you should know about:

• Low-fidelity prototypes: Pared back and low on detail. Includes sketches, storyboards, models, wireframes, and roleplays.
• Medium-fidelity prototypes: Still bare bones, but with slightly more detail. Wireframes might have click-through options; storyboards might have more speech or color added.
• High-resolution prototypes: Nearly complete versions of the real thing, with specific details added.

Human-centered design means designing for everyone

Designing inclusive experiences starts with the understanding that everyone approaches your product differently, and that their abilities, devices, environments, and emotions vary wildly.

That’s why human-centered thinking means shaping experiences that work for people regardless of their circumstances.

Consider accessibility. Around 1 in 5 people has some form of disability, whether permanent, temporary, or situational. Designing with those users in mind doesn’t just help that 20% (and “just” is doing some heavy lifting here) — it leads to better, more flexible experiences for everyone.

Take something as simple as a voice search feature. It might be a lifeline for someone with a motor impairment, but it also helps a parent trying to order groceries while holding a baby. Good design anticipates needs like this — through thoughtful consideration of real-life use cases.

The bottom line? Designing for accessibility is both a responsibility and a competitive advantage.

Technology and design need to work together

Even the most intuitive interfaces flop if the technology powering it is slow or disconnected.

Speed, reliability, and scalability all shape a user’s impression of a product. If your app takes forever to load (“forever” = more than 3 seconds), or a dashboard crashes under pressure, users will disengage — no matter how well-designed the visuals are.

Likewise, if your systems can’t support accessible features like screen readers or flexible layouts, whole groups of users will be excluded.

Behind every experience are key technical decisions: how easily can you update content? Can your product evolve with user feedback? Does your tech stack support fast iteration and testing?

Experience design means aligning design goals with tech capabilities from the start. It’s not enough for teams to work in parallel — they need to collaborate. Developers, designers, researchers, and strategists all shape the experience together. When everything’s joined up, it creates the kind of seamless, trustworthy experience that users love.

Diagramming your way to better design

Empathy sits at the heart of user experience design. But it’s not about guessing or going it alone. The best way to understand your users is by pairing empathy with evidence — turning insights into action through a clear, collaborative process.

That’s where Cacoo comes in. Map journeys, visualize systems, and refine designs together, all in real time. Whether you’re building wireframes or mapping out customer flows, Cacoo keeps everyone on the same page — even if you’re scattered across different locations. In fact, with live editing, comments, and version tracking, it’s especially handy for remote teams who want a more joined-up approach to design. Ready to give it a try?

This post was originally published on September 3, 2021, and updated most recently on October 8, 2025.