What is User Experience Design?

Google Design and Apple, have open source about their design and their philosophies. 
IOS Human interface guidelines, design themes. 
Suggestions to app developers.
Grids, different areas of the screen.
Referencing and considering their ideas. 
Material Design which is associated with google apps. 
design.google
What, when , where, why and how, who.
Everything that affects the user's experience with the product.
Constantly questioning, the answers to these questions that shape the design.
The audience and business needs. 
Business needs and user needs overlap. 
User centred design process, takes the user's need into account into every stage of the product lifecycle. 
- Doing some of this stuff already.
- User centred design is a process, applying it to humans and their behaviour, very scientific. 
- It's not rocket science.
- Fascinating, rewarding, challenging. 
The design behind the visuals, visual design is just one small part of it. 
Asking a tonne of questions and going through a scientific process to create the visuals.
UX Mastery.com
Brief, audience, hierarchy, mandatory requirements. 
Human Computer Interaction
Usability
Need audience in mind, those people set the criteria by which you create effective visual communications. 
Completely embedded within our day to day activities, socially enhancing.
Do Goals and Be Goals. 
Hassenzahl and Roto
User Experience - Ways in which the user/customer experiences using the product on their own terms. 
User Experience Design - Informed manipulation and development of the factors that influence to user's experience. 
Proceeds any kind of visual design. 
It informs visual interface design. 

Analyse - Business research, user research, data analysis and conceptualisation. 
Design - Creating concepts, interaction behaviours, look and feel.
Prototypes - realising design alternatives
Evaluate- verifying and refining. Whatever solution is supported by criteria set out within user research.
Iterate - Getting it the best it possibly can be. 

User Research - Focus groups, interviews, observations, identifying and conceptualising user roles, user needs, task flows, etc. Numerical ,statistical, qualitative, analysing data. Looking at different ways of researching, user based research.

Personas - Characteristics of archetypal users. Can't please every single one, need to generalise. Reflecting on data found in user research, focus on the present, their current thinking and current state of mind, be realistic not idealistic, describe a challenging target user, provide insight to the users' context, behaviours, attitudes, needs, challenges, goals and motivations, social life, attitudes, needs, paying points, ease of use, in depth, be exhaustive as possible.  

Task Flows/User Flows - Flow chart methods, visualise the stages involved in completing certain tasks within the app, or the journey a user takes through the system. Identifying specific issues within the format. Look at series of events, reducing stages.

Wireframes - First step to putting all the user research, personas, workflows etc, into a visual format. Thinking about layout, testing hierarchies. Placeholder images and text. 

Should aim to use all of the techniques discussed here, can begin to consider user flows and develop specific personas.