What do UX designers usually do?

Spend a few minutes on LinkedIn and you'd think everyone is talking about UX design (or maybe that's just my algorithm, but you get the idea). And yet, whenever I meet someone outside the digital world and they ask me what I do for a living, my answer often leaves them puzzled. I usually try to explain concepts like user research, information architecture, or user experience. Sometimes I even give up, especially when the conversation ends with: "Oh, so you're a graphic designer!"

Not exactly... but I understand the confusion. There are many different design professions, and if you don't work in the industry, it's not always easy to tell them apart.

There are interior designers, industrial designers, graphic designers... and in the digital world, a whole range of roles including web designers, UX designers, UI designers, and the even the combo UX/UI designer.

The goal of this article is to explain what a UX designer actually does. And since, at Antistatique, we've chosen to keep UX and UI as separate roles, I'll also say a few words about our UI designer colleagues.

When people hear the word design, they often think about aesthetics. In reality, design is first and foremost about creating something that solves a problem or fulfills a specific need.

In the digital world, several different professions fall under this broad umbrella. They all share the same goal: creating products that are useful, intuitive, and easy to understand. The difference is that each discipline focuses on a different aspect.

As a UX designer, my job is to design the experience people have when using a website, an application, or any digital service.

That's exactly what UX stands for: User Experience.

User experience encompasses everything that happens when someone interacts with a digital product. It includes how they navigate a website or app, find information, understand content, or complete a task, whether that's making a purchase, booking a service, or filling out a form.

Designing that experience means thinking carefully about many different elements:

Shoutout to the person who once told me, "Oh, I get it... so you just line up buttons." My heart broke that day, and the scar still hurts.

SO YES, we do occasionally spend time debating the placement of a button. But we do plenty of other things too!

Everything above may seem obvious, right? In reality, it's often the most visible part of our work, but it actually comes much later in the process. Before deciding where a button should go or how a page should be organized, we first need to understand who we're designing for.

A UX designer's work therefore begins with user research.

The goal is simple: understand the needs, behaviors, expectations, and frustrations of the people who will use the product. It's a major analysis phase. And personally, it's my favorite part of the job! I get to meet people, learn about their habits, understand their constraints, and challenge myself to come up with practical solutions that genuinely improve their experience.

User research can take many forms: one-on-one interviews, focus groups, surveys, observation of people using an existing product, or data analysis. The insights we gather allow us to make design decisions based on evidence rather than assumptions.

We all interact with digital interfaces differently. Age, habits, goals, physical or cognitive abilities, and even the context in which someone uses a product all influence the experience. Our role is to design products that work for this diversity of users.

Of course, we can't forget about our clients. They have their own goals too. A company might want to increase sales, provide information, generate sign-ups, or improve the efficiency of one of its services. Meanwhile, users simply want to achieve their own tasks as quickly and easily as possible.

Part of a UX designer's job is finding the right balance between these two perspectives and creating solutions that benefit everyone involved.

Imagine we're designing a website for booking train tickets. At first glance, the journey seems straightforward: choose a destination, select a date, and pay.

But during usability testing, we discover that many people compare several departure times before making a decision. They want to quickly identify the cheapest fares throughout the day, or easily see whether a train is direct or requires a transfer. These findings can completely reshape the design.

Perhaps we need to display fares across the entire day at a glance, or highlight the fastest routes more prominently. Without this research, we might build an interface that seems perfectly logical but doesn't actually reflect how people make decisions.

Once we have these insights, we can structure the experience and make design decisions based on real evidence rather than intuition alone.

At this point, the user research is complete. We've identified user needs, defined the information architecture, and mapped the user journeys. Now what? This is where our little baby enters shared custody.

On one side, developers help us validate and build the different concepts. On the other, we have our wonderful UI designers. They're the masters of branding, typography, color, iconography... human philosophy, the meaning of life, and the universe itself. Okay, maybe I'm getting carried away. But I genuinely admire the work of my colleagues Pierre and Akira.

Their role is to refine and polish the product until it becomes a true digital gem. There's still so much more to say about UI design, so we'll explore that in greater detail in a future article.

I could easily write for hours this profession I love so much! People often don't realize that a website or an application represents hundreds of hours of research, collaboration, and thoughtful decision-making.

UX design is a discipline that combines empathy, logic, curiosity, critical thinking, and creativity. That's probably what I enjoy most about it: every project brings new lessons, new discoveries, and new challenges.

I think I can safely speak for my colleagues at Antistatique when I say that every project is different. That's what makes our work so interesting.