A couple weeks ago, I mentioned to someone else (another designer, actually) that I do user-experience design at work. He said, "Ya know, I hear that term more and more these days, but what does it mean?" In a really rambling, roundabout way, I tried to sum it up, and was pretty annoyed by how badly I explained it.

• "It's sorta like UI-design or Interaction design but it encompasses a lot more and is more focused on the user."
• "Oh It's awesome, you get to have hand in a little bit of everything and be a strong advocate for the person who will actually use your product."

Those statements aren't really wrong, but they're pretty vague, and a shitty response for someone that wants a tangible answer. It's been nagging me ever since, the thought that I should be able to articulate it better, even if it's only to myself.

Then a thought occurred to me on the way home tonight. A way of thinking about it that I kind of like:

User experience design is non-linear, participatory storytelling. As the designer (loaded term), you are setting a stage in a way that optimizes the user's (another loaded term) ability to craft a meaningful personal narrative about your product (yet another loaded term).

Again, it's a statement that leaves a lot of questions, but it feels like it hits at the core of it better than how I had been explaining it. The story analogy holds up pretty well. You have a starting point, somewhere around the time a person first becomes acquainted with the project/product/whatever it is that you're working on. You have a more fuzzy end-point, where possibly your project/product/whatever and that person are getting along swimmingly.

And then there's the in-between, and that's where the goods happen. There's all kinds of mechanisms to get from the start to the end, and to do it right you can't really explicitly spell out how to get there. The people ought to be will be just as much an author of the story as you are.