Wednesday 19 May 2021

UI vs UX: What is the difference between UI and UX?

on 20:51 1 Comment
At the most basic level, User experience (UX), on the other hand, is the internal experience that a person has as they interact with every aspect of a company’s products and services. The user interface (UI) is the series of screens, pages, and visual elements—like buttons and icons—that enable a person to interact with a product or service. In this article, we’ll dig a bit deeper into UI and UX to get a better understanding of the differences between them.


What is UX?

User experience, or UX, evolved as a result of the improvements to UI. Once there was something for users to interact with, their experience, whether positive, negative, or neutral, changed how users felt about those interactions.

UX designers are responsible for ensuring that the company delivers a product or service that meets the needs of the customer and allows them to seamlessly achieve their desired outcome.

The best practices for UX professionals to help guide their efforts across multiple touchpoints with the user, including:
  • The impressions they take away from the interaction as a whole.
  • The thoughts and feelings that arise as they try to accomplish their task.
  • The sequence of actions they take as they interact with the interface.
  • How they would discover your company’s product.
UX designers work closely with UI designers, UX researchers, marketers, and product teams to understand their users through research and experimentation.

What is UI?

To understand the evolution of UI design, however, it’s helpful to learn a bit more about its history and how it has evolved into best practices and a profession. Simply put, user interface (UI) is anything a user may interact with to use a digital product or service. This includes everything from screens and touchscreens, keyboards, sounds, and even lights.

Today’s UI designer has nearly limitless opportunities to work on websites, mobile apps, wearable technology, and smart home devices, just to name a few. As long as computers continue to be a part of daily life, there will be the need to make the interfaces that enable users of all ages, backgrounds, and technical experience can effectively use.

Now UI designers work not just on computer interfaces, but mobile phones, augmented and virtual reality, and even “invisible” or screenless interfaces (also referred to as zero UI) like voice, gesture, and light.

The difference between UX and UI

It’s important to distinguish the total user experience from the user interface (UI), even though the UI is obviously an extremely important part of the design. At the most basic level, UX is what the individual interacting with that product or service takes away from the entire experience. UI is made up of all the elements that enable someone to interact with a product or ui design service.

1. UX encompasses all the experiences a person has with a product or service

User interface (UI) is the specific asset users interact with. For example, UI can deal with traditional concepts like visual design elements such as colors and typography. Think about ordering food online for a pickup delivery. It can also look at the functionality of screens or more unconventional systems like those that are voiced-based.

The UX consists of the user’s interactions with placing their order on a company’s website, their in-store experience of picking up their order, and also their satisfaction with their food. To continue with the online food order example, UI would focus on the visual design of the screens a user interacts with, such as which color to make the order button and where to place it on the page.

2. UI is focused on the product, a series of snapshots in time. UX focuses on the user and their journey through the product

The UI copes with constraints; the UX challenges them.” - The UX is the path through a product, escaping the screen and articulating the user’s journey and motivations, justifying why things are in the UI and even more importantly, why things are left out.

The UI tends to be the specifics of screens, focusing on labels, visual style, guidelines, and structure. The UX focuses on the user and their journey through the product.

3. UI is the bridge that gets us where we want to go, UX is the feeling we get when we arrive

UX is the feeling we get when we get there when the bridge is well-built, or plummet to our death (talk about bad UX!). It’s also possible to have a good user experience without a user interface. In fact, if it’s really good, oftentimes your users won’t even know it’s there. To sum this up, as I always say to my superguests at the end of every User Defenders podcast episode: Keep fighting on in creating great UX for other humans!

Keep in mind that we’re always creating UX, all the time whether behind a keyboard, in the grocery store line, in our workplace, or on the freeway. It can also now be considered our voice and intentions powered by whatever the machines think we’re saying or wanting in any given context. UI is the bridge that gets us to the other side of where we’re wanting to go.

4. No difference between UX and UI design because they are two things that aren’t comparable to each other

Just as the user experience is made up of a bunch of different components, user interface design being just one of them, that when combined together make up the user experience.

For example, it’s kind of like asking, “What is the difference between red paint and the chemicals the paint is made up of?” There is no difference. Red paint is made up of all sorts of different chemicals that when combined together make red paint.
Here are a few other questions to illustrate my point:
  • What’s the difference between a car and the color it’s painted?
  • What’s the difference between tea and the type of material the tea bag is made from?
  • What is the difference between a MacBook and the shape of the keyboard keys?
If we’re talking about delicious cake, UX is the reason we’re serving cake in the first place, and why people would rather eat it than hamburgers. UI is the icing, the plates, the flavor, the utensils, and the presentation.

5. A UX designer is concerned with the conceptual aspects of the design process, leaving the UI designer to focus on the more tangible elements

The UI designer also has skills in Interaction design. Jason Mesut best describes the difference between UX and UI in his “double diamond” model. In this model, the UX designer has deep skills in strategy, research, information architecture, and interaction design.

In a professional context “User Experience Designer” has a specific meaning and set of skills, based on a community of practice reaching back over 20 years. In this world, a User Experience Designer is concerned with the conceptual aspects of the design process, leaving the UI designer to focus on the more tangible elements.

Often the words used to describe a discipline end up being divorced from their original meanings. For instance architect literally means “head mason” and plumber means “lead worker.” Two names which clearly no longer articulate or explain what that profession does.

Finally Conclusion:

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.

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Author:

Designveloper is the leading software development company in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, founded in early 2013 with a team of professional and enthusiastic Web developers, Mobile developers, UI/UX designers and VOIP experts.

1 comment:

  1. Web Development Services27 May 2021 at 06:11

    Nice post. Thank you for sharing a useful and informative blog on mobile app development trends. Keep on sharing more updates on the same. ios app development

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