UI Vs UX: Difference Between UI and UX Design
According to studies, businesses that engage in user-centered designs can receive an ROI of up to 100%. It is because smart designs can boost user engagement, resulting in increased conversions.
When it comes to user-centered designs, UI and UX play a crucial role. UX entails how a product is experienced by the users while UI entails how users interact with a product. Through this blog, we will understand the differences between UI and UX design, the role of UI and UX designers, and more.
What is UX Design?
UX design is all about designing relevant and meaningful user experiences. It involves creating a website or app and everything related to the product to enhance the user experience.
Before implementing a good layout and structured digital platform, UX designers research and brainstorm why a certain product should exist and ways to offer meaningful and useful experiences to users.
A successful UX design includes launching a product, leading a marketing campaign, packaging, after-sales support, appropriate theme, and a lot more to add value to the customer. It helps increase brand value and awareness. A good UX design of a product requires the following:
- Research phase
- Brainstorming sessions
- Implementation
- Feedback/Iteration stage
A product with a bad UX design performs poorly and will create hassle rather than helping the user out. On the other hand, a well-designed UX design goes a long way in building brand reputation and loyalty.
What is UI Design?
UI design is all about visuals. It is the face of a digital product. It’s about designing a visually appealing interface for users. UI designers tackle the following questions:
- Which fonts will better represent the brand and how will they resonate with customers?
- How to use the color combinations?
- Which layout will be best among the available ones?
- Which logo designs and styles will better connect with users?
Everything that pertains to visual elements is the work of a UI designer. They implement what UX designers ideate.
Also Read: UI Design Tools
UI and UX Differences
As UI and UX are often used interchangeably, let’s look at some of the differences between UI and UX design.
UI or UX design are two different aspects of the product design phase. Developing a good product needs equal impetus from both UI and UX teams. If the research, brainstorming, and wireframing are not done effectively by UX designers, then it will affect the end output of a product.
Stuffing with good layouts, intuitive color combinations, and smooth transitions is insufficient if the flow and feel of a website are sub-par. It will be like watching a film with great casting, superb stunt scenes, and beautiful cinematography but missing a storyline that holds everything together.
To understand UX vs UI better, refer to the table given below.
| Parameters | UX Design | UI Design |
|---|---|---|
| End Goal | Creates products with effective user experience. | Creates digital products that are aesthetically good. |
| Physical/Digital Product | It applies both to physical as well as digital products. | It applies only to digital products. |
| Key Focus | Make the user experience great from the start till the end. | Make the product visually appealing for users. |
| Knowledge Required | Structural design solutions that hook users for increased retention and ease of use, and a good understanding of the targeted user’s mindset. | Typography, color palettes, animations, imagery, and other touchpoints enhance visual appeal. |
| Key Domain | Product strategy | Color theory |
| Main Role | User research, testing, and iteration | Building interactive products with animation |
| Top Industries to Work For | IT, software, business, education, government agencies, healthcare, retail, advertising, etc. | Any domain that has a digital presence will need UI designers to build an attractive front-end interface. |
| Daily Roles and Responsibilities | Product strategy, wireframing, prototyping, execution, and analytics. | Improvise the look and feel of the product, and ensure the product is responsive and interactive. |
| Average Salary | USD 98,865 annually | USD 83,455 annually |
| Top Companies Hiring | TCS, Accenture, IBM, Deloitte, Infosys, Freelancer, Microsoft, Tech Mahindra | Startups, Big enterprises, and other companies. |
Let’s take the example of an online shopping app experience.
The app will have the following:
- Hundreds of product catalogs with thousands of options.
- Search options, product descriptions, customer reviews, filters, product prices, discounts, buttons for like, share, add to cart, save for later, etc.
- Multiple payment options, address fields, a clean user interface, sharp fonts, clear images, videos, etc.
These options result from hundreds of hours of research, brainstorming sessions, user analysis, search intent analysis, user mentality, sentiments, etc. UX designers take care of all these aspects.
UX design deals with the entire user journey, including how a user will navigate the app, how to speed up the shopping experience, how to nudge the user to buy the product, save it for later, and how to make the payment a hassle-free experience.
The UI design team decides the look and feel of the app. Button shapes, placement of icons, search results, animations, transitions, scrolling effects, displaying of products, font sizes, and a lot of other features are decided by UI designers.
UI Vs UX Designers – An Overview
The roles fall under the purview of product development. UX and UI designers are crucial to a product and must work closely like a tight-knit team. UI designers and UX designers complement each other’s work. One cannot exist without the other. You don’t need to know UX in-depth to become a UI designer, and vice versa is also true.
A UX designer’s task is to map out the entire journey of a user visiting a particular website, app, or platform. They start by researching and studying user mindsets, intentions, and motivations. They are also responsible for brainstorming ideas and concepts they want to implement based on their research.
UI designers take this input and create output to meet the requirements aesthetically. Without a UI designer, a UX designer will not be able to create a tangible product or prototype.
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What Does a UX Designer Do?
A UX designer works on a list of complex and multifaceted tasks. Every company/business is different and functions differently. A UX designer works on:
- Product Strategy: UX designers perform competitor analysis to gauge their competitors and understand their approach to problems. In addition, they have to study customer mentality and sentiments. Research on customers is an important component of their job description. All observations from these researches go into building product strategy and structure.
- Wireframing and Prototyping: Wireframing forms the skeleton of the process flow that will enrich a customer’s experience. Prototyping the concepts helps UX designers put their ideas into practice. Once a prototype is ready, they are responsible for testing through continuous iterations. They also have to develop a solid development plan which will direct actions into building the final product.
- Execution and Analytics: UX designer needs to coordinate with UI designers to bring their ideas to reality while continuously being in touch with developers for back-end tasks.
What Does a UI Designer Do?
The job role of a UI designer includes:
- The Look and Feel of the Product: The UI designer’s role revolves around visual appeals, aspects, and aesthetics. They deal with the look and feel of a product by taking part in user analysis, conducting design research, and working on branding and graphic development. In addition, they prepare user guides and storylines about how a user will navigate across a platform.
- Responsiveness and Interactivity: Next, the UI designer creates interactive animations and other visual elements like buttons, scrollbars, navigational elements, etc. They work on making the platform responsive to all digital devices and closely work with developers for better implementation.
Also Read: Best UX Design Tools
Conclusion
While the terms UI and UX design are sometimes used interchangeably, they are distinct disciplines with unique focuses. UX design is concerned with the total user experience and how a user feels when interacting with the product, whereas UI design is concerned with the visual and interaction parts of a product. A strong user experience is dependent on the seamless integration of both UI vs UX design, and designers should try to develop products that not only look attractive but also work naturally and suit the demands of users.
FAQs
While UI designers focus more on the aesthetics of a product, UX designers’ end goal is to create products with an effective overall user experience. Though both roles are in equal demand, UX designers tend to get paid more.
UX design is used to create products for effective user experience whereas UI design creates products that look aesthetically good. Another major difference is that UX design applies to both physical and digital products but UI design is used only for digital products.
In the design process, UX comes before UI, so it seems logical to learn it first. But UI is much easier to learn than UX. Depending on your experience and interest, you can choose the one you want to learn first.
The major difference between UX and UI is that while UI is concerned with the elements through which a user interacts with the product, UX is all about the user’s interaction with the product and what they took from the entire experience.
