Over the last year, we’ve started explaining design as «the rendering of intent.» The designer imagines an outcome and puts forth activities to make that outcome real.

We’ve found this definition seems to resonate with people more than any other. People can see the relationship between the intended outcome and the process that renders it.

Experiences are the journeys that people take before, during, and after coming into contact with our design. We can choose our intentions for what we want our users’ journeys to be. And when we render those intentions, we’re designing for our users’ experiences. Experience design is rendering intentions of the user’s journey.

We need to look at our design process as a way to come to a single intention as much as it is to make that intention real in the world. And it’s with the lens of this new definition that we can see we still have much work to do before every design will be a great one.

Jared M. Spool.