There has been always confusion among designers about the difference between UI and UX design. Which one has a big role and what kind of work needs to be done in both of the roles? Some of them consider both are same, while others consider both to be different. The reality is that UI design and UX design are completely different.
UI design stands for User Interface which is all about the presentation or looks and feels part of a website. On the other hand, UX design is all about User Experience with the product, or how easy it is for a user to complete the desired task.
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UI vs UX
Let’s understand this with a very basic example. When you attend a wedding and go for your dinner you see a lot of stalls arranged there for different food items. Each item has different spoons and you also find food tags there. That’s how you easily find your favorite dish. So you are happy with the presentation there. This is considered a UI design, which is about the look and feels or designing part.
Now when you try to serve your favorite dish in your plate, you find a lot of crowd on stalls or you are looking for a waiter to serve your plate but the waiter is not available or water counter is too far away from all the stalls. So your experience with using the service was too bad and these all come under your user experience with the service or product. Now let’s discuss these two crucial designing part in technical term and job role involved there.
UX Design/User Experience Design
UX Design is all about the user interaction or overall experience of a user with the product, webpage or an application. How the customer feels about the product when he/she is using the service and if he/she is facing any problem while interacting with the product or application, also how easy it was for a user to perform a certain task to use a product. UX can have everything from physical product to digital experience.
It considers a user’s journey to solve a problem. Think of e-commerce, online food delivery or online travel company website where how easy it was for a user to make the payment, how long it took to complete the payment is considered as UX design. Empathy is a crucial part of UX design. UX designers need to put themselves in customer’s shoes. So it’s all about the overall experience of a user with the product.
Job Role of UX Designers
- Normally UX design is always done first which start from market research to build a product. A UX designer will figure out all the target users first.
- UX designers do face to face interviews or online questioning to find out why people use that specific product, what are the needs of a customer in a product or their expectations, things that customer like or dislike.
- UX designers also do competitive analysis in the market. It means all the similar kind of product available in the market, price of the product, additional features in the product, why people use that product, schemes on the product and after research, they analyze what are the additional things can be added in their own product.
- UX designers prepare all the documentation after the research which mentions everything about the other app and their own app. Why their own app is better than other apps, what are the additional features they will add in their own app.
- UX designers also make wireframes which include basic designing or we can say the structure of a product. There will be basic line drawings and it includes layout off an application on pages. So they prepare the pages of design through wireframes.
- UX designers are responsible for making interactive or paper prototypes.
- UX designers do user testing as well. It means UX designers make understand to a user about the flow of a product through prototype and will tell him to complete a certain task to take the feedback from the user like what are the problems that user is facing and other aspects.
- UX designers also prepare interaction design like flow diagram of a product where things or information should be aligned, page redirection and all.
- UX designers do usability testing once the product is implemented by UI designer and developer. In this process again UX designer will ask the user to perform a certain task and note down everything about the user experience or problem that he or she is facing. According to the user feedback, all the changes will be done.
Also Read: Getting Started with UX Design
UI Design/User Interface Design
UI design is what is used to interact with the product and it focuses on user visual experience. Whatever we design on screen through buttons, layout, slider, using color, etc to present the product for user interaction comes under UI design. It also includes if the customer is able to understand the product through the design part or not. If we open a webpage then how it looks like, where are the buttons, tapping a button, scrolling down a page, alignment of different elements, swiping through images everything considered in UI design? We can take the example of any social media site layout, comment section, profile page section, like buttons, menus, latest news feed and all come under the UI part. So look and feel of a website, user-friendly part or presentation part comes under UI design.
Job Role of UI Designers
- After the user testing role of UX designers, UI designers take all the details, wireframes from UX designers and make high fidelity wireframes or will use photoshop kind of software to make mockup design.
- Now the UI designers will decide what should be the branding of the product, color, buttons, scrollbars, the spacing between elements, size or shape and also consider visual design principles. In different mobile devices what are things that are possible to complete. Logo, typography, how many pages should be their responsiveness, links, etc.
- UI designers also establish style guides.
- Overall UI designers responsibility include visual communication and graphics design.
Conclusion
From the above explanation we can summarize or understand UI and UX design through below image. The UI design is basically a small role in UX design and both are important to make a good product.
- A UX designer design a path for the user to follow because he/she thinks that this is the most pleasurable path for the user to experience the application of the website. A UI designer actually creates pages that follow the path that UX designer has chosen for the user.
- UX designer has to keep in mind the user’s goal. UX is a highly analytical and logical thing. UX designers need to think from the user’s perspective and it’s more about the understanding user. UI designers need to be creative to design a product or webpage.
- UX is all about making a product functional and useful, on the other hand, UI is making a product beautiful and interactive.
Final Conclusion
Now if you are confused which career is suitable for you then it depends on what do you like. If you were on empathy and love to understand what user or customer wants from the product and if you love to solve their problems then UX design is a better choice. If you love to design the product, love to decide the overall layout, size, color animation part and present that with your creative thought process then UI is better for you. Most of the companies hire a single person for both of the UX and UI job role, so you can also choose both.