UI
Unlike UX, user interface design is a strictly digital term. A user interface is the point of interaction between the user and a digital device or product—like the touchscreen on your smartphone, or the touchpad you use to select what kind of coffee you want from the coffee machine. In relation to websites and apps, UI design considers the look, feel, and interactivity of the product. It’s all about making sure that the user interface of a product is as intuitive as possible, and that means carefully considering each and every visual, interactive element the user might encounter. A UI designer will think about icons and buttons, typography and color schemes, spacing, imagery, and responsive design.
UX
User experience design is a human-first way of designing products. Don Norman, a cognitive scientist and co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group Design Consultancy, is credited with coining the term user experience in the late 1990s. User experience encompasses all aspects of the end-user’s interaction with the company, its services, and its products. Essentially, UX applies to anything that can be experienced—be it a website, a coffee machine, or a visit to the supermarket. The user experience part refers to the interaction between the user and a product or service. User experience design, then, considers all the different elements that shape this experience. A UX designer thinks about how the experience makes the user feel, and how easy it is for the user to accomplish their desired tasks. For example: How easy is the checkout process when shopping online? How easy is it for you to grip that vegetable peeler? Does your online banking app make it easy for you to manage your money? The ultimate purpose of UX design is to create easy, efficient, relevant, and all-round pleasant experiences for the user.
A UX designer considers the user’s entire journey to solve a particular problem; what steps do they take? What tasks do they need to complete? How straightforward is the experience? Much of their work focuses on finding out what kinds of problems and pain-points users come up against, and how a certain product might solve them. They’ll conduct extensive user research in order to find out who the target users are and what their needs are in relation to a certain product. They’ll then map out the user’s journey across a product, considering things like information architecture—i.e. How the content is organized and labelled across a product—and what kinds of features the user might need. Eventually, they’ll create wireframes which set out the bare-bones blueprints for the product.
Importance of UI/UX
So a UX designer decides how the user interface works while the UI designer decides how the user interface looks. This is a very collaborative process, and the two design teams tend to work closely together. As the UX team is working out the flow of the app, how all of the buttons navigate you through your tasks, and how the interface efficiently serves up the information user’s need, the UI team is working on how all of these interface elements will appear on screen. Let’s say at some point in the design process it’s decided that extra buttons need to be added to a given screen. This will change how the buttons will need to be organized and could require changing their shape or size. The UX team would determine the best way to lay out the buttons while the UI teams adapt their designs to fit the new layout. Constant communication and collaboration between UI and UX designers help to assure that the final user interface looks as good as it can, while also operating efficiently and intuitively.
How we work on UI/UX
We as a designer think about how the experience makes the user feel, and how easy it is for the user to accomplish their desired tasks. It’s all about making sure that the user interface of a product is as intuitive as possible, and that means carefully considering each and every visual, interactive element the user might encounter. We as UI designers think about icons and buttons, typography and color schemes, spacing, imagery, and responsive design etc. And then we make a proper combination of assets to make a user friendly UI that keeps UX awesome.