Nielsen Norman Group's UX Disciplines Glossary Defines 26 Fields

Nielsen Norman Group has published a UX disciplines glossary defining 26 fields related to user experience, ranging from UX design, UI design, visual design, interaction design, and service design to UX research and DesignOps. Although people frequently use terms like UX, UI, CX, and visual design as synonyms, they describe distinct areas of work, and several terms carry both a field-level meaning and a product-level meaning.

According to Nielsen Norman Group, job titles across the industry lack standardization, with respondents to its UX-careers survey reporting 134 unique UX-related job titles. Because one practitioner may cover multiple specialties and identical titles can vary by company, the glossary outlines typical boundaries across both UX subfields (such as UX research) and adjacent disciplines often confused with UX (such as market research).

Agent experience (AX) focuses on designing digital products and services so AI agents acting for human users can reliably understand and operate them. This work can involve structuring information for accurate agent interpretation, providing tool descriptions and permissions so agents can act, and offering APIs that give agents direct access without a human-facing user interface.

Content design determines what information users require, when they need it, and the best way to deliver it by selecting, structuring, formatting, and presenting content around user needs and context. Practitioners typically combine writing and design skills and may handle information architecture, wireframing, and prototyping, making the practice broader than UX writing, which concentrates on interface wording.

Content strategy is the ongoing planning for creating, delivering, and governing useful, usable, and effective content. It defines content purpose, ownership, maintenance, format, distribution, organization, and integration into the wider user experience, focusing on content processes while content design and UX writing produce the content itself.

Conversation design shapes natural-language exchanges between users and systems such as chatbots, voice assistants, and AI assistants powered by large language models. Blending interaction design and UX writing for interfaces where conversation is the primary or sole UI, it defines system phrasing, how information is requested and confirmed, and how misunderstandings are handled.

Customer experience (CX) refers both to the discipline of studying and improving the lifetime relationship between customers and an organization, and to the sum of a customer's interactions across touchpoints like advertising, purchasing, support, and post-purchase followup. While UX and CX overlap heavily, some practitioners now use “UX” for a single product interaction - such as registering on a mobile app - and “CX” for every interaction across the entire relationship.

Design operations (DesignOps) orchestrates and optimizes people, processes, and craft so design teams can scale their value and impact while allowing designers to focus on design work. It establishes team structures, workflows, and metrics as teams grow, with common roles including design program manager and design producer.

Employee experience (EX) covers both the discipline of studying and improving what it is like to work at an organization - across internal tools, processes, policies, and physical spaces - and employees' perceptions of those organizational interactions. Applying a CX-style approach to staff, EX is frequently led by human resources, while UX teams typically contribute via service design and internal software or intranet design.

Experience design (XD) is an umbrella approach to crafting optimized experiences across individual product interactions, multi-step user journeys, and lifetime customer relationships. Encompassing UX, CX, service design, and product design, it emphasizes people, structured problem solving, iteration, user research, and journey mapping, and “experience designer” often serves as an alternative title for a UX designer.

Graphic design communicates information visually using typography, imagery, color, and layout across print, packaging, signage, advertising, and digital media. Predating digital interfaces by a wide margin, its core principles are applied to interactive products through visual design in UX.

Human factors and ergonomics examines how people interact with surrounding systems, tools, and environments, applying knowledge of human physical and cognitive capabilities and limits to improve both human and system performance. Practiced ahead of modern UX and common in safety-critical fields like aviation, healthcare, automotive design, and industrial control, it helped originate UX methods such as task analysis.

Human-computer interaction (HCI) is an academic research field studying how people use computers and how to design usable computing systems by combining computer science, cognitive psychology, and design. While HCI is mainly academic and UX is primarily a professional practice, the two overlap substantially and UX relies heavily on HCI theories and methods.

Information architecture (IA) is the practice of organizing and maintaining website or application content, defining relationships between content pieces, and determining how content appears in navigation UI. Rather than being part of the on-screen interface itself, IA informs the UI, and the term also describes the specific content and functional structure of a given site or app.

Interaction design (IxD) defines how a product and its users respond to one another, covering available user actions, system feedback, and state changes triggered by user input. Interaction designers focus on flows, controls, states, and behaviors, whereas visual design addresses how those elements look.

Market research gathers data on markets, customers, competitors, demand, and attitudes to guide business decisions like segmentation, pricing, positioning, and market strategy. Although it shares many research methods with UX research, UX research focuses on user needs, behaviors, and product interactions to guide design decisions.

Marketing positions, communicates, and delivers products or services to generate value for both customers and the business. The discipline encompasses market research to understand the market, attracting prospective customers, and engaging current ones.

Motion design creates animations and transitions - including animated graphics for video and advertising outside UX - to serve specific interface functions within UX. In digital products, motion provides feedback confirming user actions, communicates state changes, clarifies a user's place within a hierarchy, and signals how elements can be interacted with.

In software, product design means designing a digital product end to end while balancing user needs with business goals and product strategy (unlike physical object design outside software). Often similar to a UX designer focused on a single product - sometimes with greater UI responsibility or closer ties to product management - a product designer differs from a product manager, who decides what to build and why through strategy, roadmaps, and priorities.

Product management builds a product strategy that delivers business and user value, communicates it to partners, and oversees execution by setting the vision and roadmap, prioritizing features, and usually owning business outcomes. While product and UX design determine how the product works for users, product management decides what it should do and why, collaborating closely with designers on areas like discovery and prioritization.

Research operations (ResearchOps or ReOps), frequently treated as part of DesignOps, orchestrates and optimizes people, processes, and craft to scale the impact and value of research. Nielsen Norman Group notes that ResearchOps spans six specific areas:

• Participants: recruiting, screening, scheduling, and compensating study participants.
• Governance: managing consent, privacy, and information storage.
• Knowledge: collecting, synthesizing, and sharing research insights.
• Tools: managing the toolset used for research.
• Competency: educating and onboarding others to conduct research.
• Advocacy: communicating the value of research across the organization.

Service design plans and designs how people, processes, systems, and touchpoints coordinate to deliver a service across customer experience, employee experience, and internal organizational workflows. Using service blueprints to map how business resources (people, props, and processes) connect, it looks behind the scenes at how an organization creates the experience, whereas UX focuses primarily on what the end user directly encounters.

User experience (UX) as a discipline focuses on designing and improving interactions and overall experiences across a product, service, or brand, encompassing UX research, UX design, content design, information architecture, and related specialties. As an experience, it describes the holistic relationship - perceptions, emotions, and interactions - between a person and a product, service, or organization across a single interaction, a multi-step journey, or a long-term relationship, though some reserve “user experience” for interaction-level experiences and “customer experience” for the broader relationship.

User-interface (UI) design covers the design of a website or application's interface, combining interaction design and visual design across components like buttons and clickable links, design elements like images, icons, and headers, and interactions. Because the UI is only one component of overall UX, a product with a well-designed UI can still deliver a poor user experience if it lacks needed content or functionality.

UX design is the design practice within the wider UX field dedicated to making products and services usable, useful, and suited to user needs and contexts. Sitting alongside UX research and content design, a UX designer's scope varies by organization and can include interaction design, information architecture, prototyping, and some research.

UX research (or user research) studies actual and prospective users' behaviors, needs, motivations, and usage contexts so product-design decisions rely on evidence rather than opinions. Conducted at any stage of development - and also used to describe an individual study with human participants - it uses qualitative and quantitative methods including:

• Usability testing
• Interviews
• Field studies
• Diary studies
• Surveys
• Analytics

UX writing crafts clear, concise, and contextually appropriate interface copy - such as labels, buttons, error messages, and instructions - tailored to users' contexts, needs, and behaviors to guide them through an experience. Its scope is narrower than content design, which also governs how content is structured and presented.

Visual design determines how interface elements including line, shape, color, grid, and space work together, applying graphic design principles to interactive interfaces so that visual design governs how elements look while interaction design governs how they behave. Beyond aesthetics, effective visual design can improve usability, evoke emotion, and reinforce brand perception.

This article was written by AI from reporting by nngroup.com.