The field of user experience represents an expansion and extension of the field of usability, to include the holistic perspective of how a person feels about using a system. The focus is on pleasure and value as well as on performance. The exact definition, framework, and elements of user experience are still evolving.

User experience of an interactive product or a website is usually measured by a number of methods, including questionnaires, focus groups, observed usability tests, user journey mapping and other methods.

Designing is also a widespread activity outside of the professions of those formally recognized as designers. In his influential book The Sciences of the Artificial the interdisciplinary scientist Herbert A. Simon proposed that “Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones”.

Institutions for design education date back to the nineteenth century. The German art and design school Bauhaus, founded in 1919, greatly influenced modern design education.

Design education covers the teaching of theory, knowledge, and values in the design of products, services, and environments, and focuses on the development of both particular and general skills for designing. Its primary orientation is to prepare students for professional design practice, based around project work and studio or atelier teaching methods.

There are also broader forms of higher education in design studies and design thinking. Design also features as a part of general education, for example within Design and Technology. The development of design in general education in the 1970s created a need to identify fundamental aspects of ‘designerly’ ways of knowing, thinking, and acting, resulting in the establishment of design as a distinct discipline of study.