Though I was initially resistant, I've been bit by the product design bug. User interfaces, user experience flowcharts, type ramping, color schemes, usability studies—I've come to love it all. As I've set out to grow my knowledge of this rapidly evolving design field, one of my biggest questions has been: what in the world is the difference between UI and UX? They seem to be interchangeable, but are they the same thing? Today we will explore the similarities and differences between the two disciplines as I have come to understand it. A disclaimer: UI/UX design is a rapidly developing field and the titles and job descriptions evolve just as rapidly.
UI vs UX: Core Definitions
A good place to start in unpacking the UI/UX relationship is to define the acronyms:
UI stands for User Interface and UX stands for User Experience.
UI
A designer working in UI is, by definition, concerned with the User Interface of a product. This encompasses all the visual elements of the product that the user will interact with. These components include:
Typefaces
Color schemes
Animations
Layouts
Iconography
Visual coherence of different pages
Size of buttons
Basically anything that could be found in a project style guide lies in the domain of a UI designer. If its on the screen, its UI.
UX
A UX designer is concerned with the experience that a user has with the product being developed. A large part of the UX role is research and strategy development. A UX designer is responsible for knowing what the product is supposed to accomplish, learning what users need from the product to interact with it well and balancing research with the vision and goals of stakeholders (if you're working for a company at scale). This can include:
Designing information architecture (menu layouts, site mapping)
Wireframing page layouts (basic, sketch level overviews of page design)
Conducting usability studies (how accessible is the product, how much value do users get by using it, how well does the product fit the intended market)
Researching the market (what is competition doing, what does the market need)
Designing and prototyping interactions (what happens when a user clicks on a button, how can animation help guide a user through the product, how much can be communicated without text and what needs to be explicit)
One way to think about the difference between UI and UX is that UI deals with how a product looks and UX deals with how it works and users feel about it. UI works in Sketch and Photoshop, UX works with flowcharts and sticky notes.
UI vs UX: Are the titles interchangeable?
The short answer is yes, and no. A good thing to remember is that the lines drawn between the roles are relative to the company structure in which you work. In a large tech company like Google or Facebook, discrete teams dedicated to UI and UX may exist with even further specializations in IA (Information Architecture) and IxD (Interaction Design). But in smaller teams, a single designer or team of designers may be responsible for both UI and UX components of the product. While the titles are helpful in creating categories for work and discrete workflows, titles don't really matter all that much in the end. Rest assured, you can be a UI Designer and UX Designer at the same time and the world won't explode. If you really care about titles, pick the area you specialize in most.
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