A UX designer designs the path: what someone is looking for, in what order they find it, what they understand, where they get lost. A UI designer designs the surface: colour, type, components, states. The two overlap, but their failures differ — an ugly interface remains usable, an incomprehensible one does not.
What the work involves
- Research. Interviews, observation, analysis of real journeys. The part most often cut, and the one whose absence costs most.
- Information architecture. Deciding what goes where. Most problems blamed on design are problems of classification.
- Prototyping. Making a hypothesis manipulable before building it.
- Testing. Five people surface the majority of serious problems in a journey. That is cheap, and still too rarely done.
The self-report trap
The least reliable data in user research is what the user reports about themselves. People rationalise after the fact, want to be helpful, and systematically underestimate their own difficulty.
This is why a well-run usability test observes a task instead of asking for an opinion. "Find the delivery price" produces usable data. "Do you find this site clear?" produces none.
The most useful rule in the field: listen to what users do, not what they say. It is old, repeated everywhere, and ignored almost everywhere.
Accessibility
Not a constraint added at the end. Contrast, target size, tab order, field labels and respect for reduced-motion preferences serve everyone — not only disabled people. A 44-pixel button is easier for anyone to hit.
In Europe, digital accessibility is a legal obligation for a growing set of organisations. It is also, more simply, the part of the work with the widest reach.
What behavioural observation adds
Classical research observes the task. It rarely observes the manner: speed, hesitation, distance, backtracking. Those signals exist in every interface.
RÉSONANCE pushes the idea to its limit: an environment with no task, no instruction and no question, where only the manner is recorded. Fifty-seven variables follow. It is a way of asking, within art, a question design asks every day.