02 Nov What Does a UX Designer Actually Do? (And Why It Matters When You Hire One)
Part 9 of UX Foundations for Small Business Websites — a series on the UX principles I use in client work. This one answers a simple question: what does a UX designer do? In fact, the Nielsen Norman Group publishes the formal definition of the UX practice.
If you picture a UX designer’s day as “making screens pretty in a design program,” you’re picturing about a third of the job — on a good day.
I’m writing this as the second-to-last post in this series. After eight articles of principles, it helps to see the human job underneath them. It’ll also help you hire better, whether you hire me or somebody else.
What does a UX designer do all week
Learning about people. Interviews, site visits, watching analytics, reading the messages customers send at midnight. A UX designer is part detective: the brief says one thing, the evidence says another, and the job is to find out which is true before building on it.
Giving a product its structure. Before colors, there’s architecture: what pages exist, what they’re called, what lives where, in what order a task flows. Get this wrong and no amount of visual polish saves you — it’s a beautiful house with the bathroom off the kitchen.
Designing how it behaves. Not just how a page looks, but what happens when you tap, scroll, make a mistake, lose your connection, or come back next week. Forms, menus, buttons, error messages, empty pages (“you have no results — here’s what to try instead”). Most of a user’s experience lives in these in-between moments, and somebody has to think them through on purpose.
Designing how it looks. Yes, this part too — type, color, spacing, imagery — but in service of everything above. Visual design is the last 10% of the work and the first 100% of what a client sees, which is exactly why it’s so easy to overrate in a portfolio and underrate everything underneath it.
Testing and revising. Putting drafts in front of users, watching the design fail in interesting ways, and fixing it. A designer who won’t show you testing — or who treats revision as an insult — is selling you their first draft at full price.
Working as part of a team. Real projects have developers, writers, photographers, stakeholders with budgets, and deadlines with teeth. UX work lives in constant conversation with all of them: explaining decisions, hearing constraints early enough to matter, and knowing which battles are about users and which are about taste. Solo studio or big agency, nobody does this job in a vacuum.
Three shapes of designer you’ll meet when hiring
Agencies organize this work differently, and knowing the shapes helps you compare quotes honestly:
- Specialists go deep on one slice — only research, only visual design, only interaction work. Wonderful on big teams where the slices are covered by different people.
- Generalists cover the whole range competently. Common in smaller studios and in-house teams where one person wears most of the hats.
- T-shaped designers — my shape — have one deep spike of expertise and a broad working knowledge across the rest. My spike is web design and development: I’ve been building sites since 2009, I design them and I build them in WordPress, so a decision made in the design chair survives contact with the code. The bar across the top — branding, graphics, SEO, content, accessibility, research habits like the ones in this series — is what lets a small client get a coherent result from one person instead of coordinating five vendors who’ve never met.
That last point is the practical one for a small business, a non-profit, or a church. A large company can hire a researcher, an interaction designer, a visual designer, and a developer, and pay for the meetings between them. Most of my clients can’t, and shouldn’t. What they need is the full chain of thinking — people, structure, behavior, looks, testing — present in one accountable place, deep where it counts most.
What to ask whoever you hire
Steal these questions for any interview, including mine:
- “Show me how you found out what users needed — not just the final design.”
- “What did testing change on a recent project?”
- “What happens to my site’s experience on a phone, and for a visitor using a screen reader?”
- “Who do I call when something’s wrong after launch?”
The answers will tell you more than any portfolio grid. A UX designer, in the end, is the person whose job is to stand on the visitor’s side of the screen and argue from there. Hire somebody who clearly loves that side of the argument.
For the record, my answers involve 17 years of building for Eastern NC clients, web, graphic, and branding work under one roof, and a 15% discount for non-profits and churches. Branding starts at $699; websites from $699. More about me or get a free quote.
Previous in this series: What Is a Design Sprint? · Next: I Completed Google’s UX Design Foundations — Here’s What It Changed
This article is my own take, in my own words, on UX principles I use in client work — informed in part by completing Google’s Foundations of User Experience (UX) Design course on Coursera. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Google or Coursera.