UX Designer

A UX designer is responsible for making sure people get along well with a digital product. UX stands for “User Experience,” meaning the experience of using something. This person determines which steps someone has to go through to get something done. For example, they decide whether buying a ticket in a train app takes three clicks or eight. This is less about colors and fonts and more about the flow and comprehensibility. An app can look beautiful and still be badly designed if nobody can find the order button.

Why poor usability costs money

If an ordering process is too complicated, customers abandon it. This can be measured: in online shops, often more than two-thirds of users leave their shopping cart without buying. Part of this is due to hurdles in the process, such as a forced customer account. Whoever removes these hurdles earns more money with the same product. That’s why UX is not a matter of decoration for companies, but an economic issue.

A second reason is trust. With banking apps or government portals, usability determines whether people use the service at all. If a form is incomprehensible, people call the hotline instead. Every one of these calls causes real costs. Good design therefore also relieves the burden on support.

There is also the aspect of accessibility. Products must be usable for people with visual or motor impairments as well. In the EU, this has been mandated since 2025 by the Accessibility Strengthening Act for many digital services. Among other things, UX designers check contrasts, font sizes, and usability without a mouse.

From user observation to clickable dummy

The work usually begins with research. UX designers observe real users, conduct interviews, or analyze data on where people drop off. From this emerges a picture of what people actually want to achieve. Only after that comes the drawing. A common misconception is that UX designers immediately start sketching screens.

The next step is the prototype. This is a clickable mock-up of the app that has no real functionality yet. You can think of it like a paper model of a house: you walk through the layout before any concrete is poured. Such prototypes are created in programs like Figma. Changes there take minutes, whereas in finished software they take weeks.

Then come tests with real people. Often five to eight test subjects are enough to find the biggest problems. The test subject is given a task and thinks aloud while clicking through. What they say is less important than what they actually do. Afterward, the design is revised, and the cycle starts over again.

Between product teams and AI tools

UX designers rarely work alone. In software companies, they sit between programmers, product owners, and marketing. There is often also a role called UI designer, who takes care of the visible interface — colors, spacing, and buttons. In smaller companies, one person does both. That’s why the terms UX and UI are often confused.

In business news, the profession currently comes up mainly in connection with artificial intelligence. Tools now generate entire screen designs on command. But this does not replace the decision about which flow makes sense for users. At the same time, a new field of work is emerging: how do you design products whose answers are sometimes wrong? This requires indicators of uncertainty and simple ways to correct an answer.

You can encounter the results of this work every day. If a login works with a single click, a deliberate decision lies behind it. If a cookie prompt intentionally hides the reject option, that’s a deliberate decision too. Such deliberately misleading designs are called dark patterns, and they are partially banned in the EU.