UX Vs. UI — Similarity & Differences

Have you ever looked at a building and admired it for its grandeur and design? What makes a building functional yet elegant? It’s generally assumed that the architect will have the answer to those questions, but it’s important to remember that it wasn’t just the architect who created such a functional, beautiful building. The architect worked with a civil engineer to ensure the building’s structural and aesthetic integrity. While there were other people who worked on the building, we can identify the architect and the civil engineer as the two leads on the project.

Similarly, UX and UI designers can be identified as two lead positions that often collaborate to ensure a project’s integrity throughout the design process.

Exploring the Design Process

Different UX design teams follow different processes to complete projects; there is no one concrete process that designers across the globe follow. However, it is very important to have an understanding of all of the steps and roles that the design process might include.

A design team working on a particular project might include a user researcher, a user experience designer, a user interface designer, and a front-end developer. However, sometimes one singular individual will have to perform all of these roles, which is why understanding the difference between each role, and that you may have to wear multiple hats while working on a project, is important. This includes understanding the differences between a UX and UI designer.

What is UX

A User Experience (UX) designer is responsible for designing the experience that users have when interacting with a product. UX designers focus on crafting products that are easy to use and understand. UX designers always put users’ needs first when considering design solutions in order to enhance customer satisfaction.The fundamentals of UX design include:

● Defining a problem

● Understanding users

● Creating personas

● Generating task and user flows

● Creating sketches, high and low fidelity wireframes, and prototypes

● Usability testing

UX designers place an emphasis on testing and validating their designs in order to meet the expectations of their users.

What is UI

User Interface design, or UI, focuses on incorporating a visual hierarchy into a design for the user to follow. This often means taking ideas outlined in a wireframe and making them into a high-fidelity design that incorporates this visual hierarchy. UI designers make products joyful to interact with.

UI designers take the mid and low fidelity designs for a project and begin to refine the designs. UI designers focus on the visual hierarchy and patterns that give visual cues to users. These items can include:

● Color scheme

● Typefaces

● Iconography

● Layout

UX Vs. UI

While UX and UI designers work together to create a final end product, there are several key differences between the two that we will explore below.

1. UX designers tend to focus on creating a product that solves a problem, while UI designers work on the design patterns and micro-details of the product.

2. UX designers think extensively about how best to make a product easy to use, while UI designers think extensively about how best to make a product delightful and enjoyable to use.

3. UX design can be used for both tangible and intangible products, while UI design tends to be limited to digital interfaces.

4. UX is what we, as users, experience, while UI is what we see while using a product.

5. UX design generally comes before UI design in an ideal design process.

Let’s take a look at an example. As most of us know, Uber was founded by Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp in 2009 t o reduce the cost of direct transportation. In this case, the problem given to the design team was to come up with a solution which would “reduce the cost of transportation.’ To understand the roles and responsibilities of each team in a better way, let’s look at the task and output from each team in the graphic below.

Creating a balance

As we have seen in this article, UX and UI design are conceptually different, but they complement each other during the design process . To create an effective, successful product, UX and UI both need to be present. There are many examples of products that look shiny and pretty, but have failed to take off because of the UX design of the product. Similarly, there are many products that are easy to use but do not have the ‘wow’ factor that good UI adds to a product.

Let’s look at another example: Google Maps vs. Apple Maps. How often do you see people using Apple maps on their phones? Your answer is mostly like, “not very often.” Why is this? Why would users choose a third party app over the default app that comes installed on their phones? The answer is usability — a combination of good UX and good UI. The Google Maps app is not only easy and intuitive to use, but it also offers local and contextual results that are presented in a visually pleasing way. The Apple Maps app, on the other hand, offers limited functionalities and is relatively clunky to use.

Conclusion

To be a good designer, it’s important to understand the differences between UX and UI design, as well as how they interact and rely on each other. It’s also important to note that the UX industry often uses and confuses these terms, which in turn can make finding job listings for your career path a little messy. Still, it’s important to define the type of design that you find most interesting and focus on those skills to create outstanding design solutions.