Hello, UX!
User experience design refers to the process of designing how a project's audience, or users, navigate the project.
In industry contexts, UX design can refer to products, websites, apps, etc.
Within the context of digital scholarship, we can think of UX as referring to the process of designing the experience of interacting with an academic project, perhaps most particularly on the web.
There are two components of user experience design: the designed object, and the experience of the person interacting with it. While we cannot control all aspects of the user interaction (we cannot predict exactly how a person will perceive a project, how long they will take to read it, etc), we can control the designed object to encourage particular types of interaction.
In industry contexts, you will see entire teams dedicated to user experience design, performing surveys, journey mapping, user research, usability testing, accessibility tests, eye tracking tests, and an extensive array of other methods. Within our context, we can focus on:
User experience design is part of making sure that the ideas we put out into the world are received and understood as effectively as possible by the audience that we are trying to communicate with. It is a concept that can and should inform the entirety of the design and build process, from the basic interface layout of a site to the color and font choices.
I like to think of user experience design as formalizing parts of the project design process. Project teams are often already thinking about user experience without necessarily going through user experience design methods. For example, a PI might rewrite some of their research to be more accessible to a broader audience, or a student building a digital exhibit might rearrange a navigation menu to make the exhibit's content visible from the home page. These are user experience considerations.
User experience methods offer us more techniques to make our projects easy to use. They are also good opportunities to talk with students and faculty about key elements of the project planning process.
Before we get into nuts and bolts, I want to note that design is and should be iterative - which is to say, it is nonlinear. Later phases in the design process may cause you to revisit earlier phases: wireframes can help shift the project team's understanding of who their audience actually is, etc. The rough design "phases" elucidated in this guide are important to follow chronologically, but they need to contain enough flexibility to revisit earlier phases as it becomes necessary. These should not be viewed as setbacks, but as natural parts of the design process - and even a sign that the project is proceeding and growing in a healthy way!