User experience design, or UX design for short, is the buzzword these days, and everyone seems to be appending it to their skill sets, sometimes with an additional ‘expert’ at the end. The sad truth is that no one can design user experiences. Not even the so-called gurus.

Having a background in marketing, I have often made an analogy with UX and positioning. The latter in marketing refers to the way your product is perceived by consumers relatively to competing products. It is the image they have of your product and the way they feel about it.
There is a clear distinction between desired positioning and perceived positioning to be made. The former is the image marketers strive to sell, while the latter is the actual image consumers end up with of the said product or service.

User experience refers to the way users perceive your product and interact with it. And just like perceived positioning, it is subjective and hard to predict.

UX is affected by three factors: the system (the interface in the case of computer interaction), the user and the context in which the interaction occurs. Of the three, only systems can be designed, while users and contexts can be predicted at best, and this is the very reason behind the unpredictability of UX. It can be audited, namely through usability testing, but never designed.

I wouldn’t argue that people who have enough experience in their respective design fields get a hang of the way users react to certain patterns, which makes the user-centric design approach even more effective. Then again, it’s not the experience that is being designed here, but rather the concrete elements (interface, content structure…) that will shape it.