Here are Veracity, we’ve spent a not-insignificant amount of time working through an appropriate way to implement user experience design (UX design) into our projects. I have found a huge amount of inspiration from Robby Ingebretsen’s MIX 09 talk on Design Fundamentals for Developers. Watch it. Then watch it again. Then grab the audio and make it the start-up, shut-down and error sound on your machine. Robby is a fantastic speaker and has thought an enormous amount about user design for software in the real world. Also, check out Robby’s blog here.

After my third or fourth viewing, I grabbed some of Robby’s helpful visuals so that I wouldn’t have to search through the videos for them. We’ve been using them internally and now, I relay them to you (with his blessings, of course).

UX Design Deliverables

Not all of these are formally necessary 100% of the time, but this chart gives a good overview of what kind of deliverables you can expect in a UX process and why they are valuable.

(click to enlarge)

User Experience Roles

Due in part to the newness of user design as a formal discipline, there are many terms used to describe roles and occupations for people involved in creating the user experience. Each of the circles in this diagram is a role, not an individual and it is perfectly reasonable to expect an individual to take on several of these roles (or all of them, if that individual is something of a polymath). But keep in mind that these roles are distinct and (as an example) you can’t expect to have a superb user experience if you don’t plan out time for your UX designer to do information architecture.