User experience is everything that happens when a person interacts with a product. Not just the interface. The whole thing. How easy it was to find. How it felt to use. Whether it solved the problem. Whether they would recommend it to a friend.

Don Norman coined the term in the 1990s while working at Apple. He wanted to describe the full range of human interaction with a system, not just the visual surface. A hotel stay is a user experience. A phone call to customer support is a user experience. A website is one part of a larger experience that might start with an ad and end with a delivery.

What shapes user experience

• Usability: can people accomplish their goals
• Accessibility: can everyone use it
• Emotion: how does it feel to use
• Performance: is it fast enough
• Trust: do people believe it will work

UX designers map user journeys, run interviews, build prototypes, and test assumptions. The job is part researcher, part designer, part advocate. The hardest part is not solving the problem. It is figuring out which problem actually matters to the people using the product. A beautiful interface that solves the wrong problem is still a bad experience.