Understanding your customer at both the objective and subjective level is vital to successful product design. Empathy with customer needs and feelings must be allowed to inform your design decisions. 

But you can’t stop there. To achieve success you must act on that empathy and follow a user-centered, iterative design process to evoke positive emotion, change acceptance, and create active engagement. 

Creating a clever solution is pointless unless it solves the problem. This can only be achieved by building the product on a foundation of user research and discovery.

Experience design is a cross-functional field combining aspects of accessibility, cognitive studies, computer science, interface design, industrial design, information architecture, communication design, quantitative and qualitative research, data science and analytics, business analytics artificial intelligence…you get the picture. 

The design of a successful product requires a comprehensive approach to solve problems for the user. These processes are dependent on each other and are most effective when applied in parallel. The UX professional is responsible for assuring all of the vital inputs have been accounted for.