The terms UI and UX (design) are very often and used as a single term by many people or designers. The first thing we need to know straight is that UI and UX are not the same. We will discuss UX vs UI in depth in the article.
Design is a rather broad and huge term. When someone says “I’m a designer,” it is not that clear what they actually do. There are a number of different responsibilities term designer. There are many aspects of design now a days.
Design related roles exist in a wide range of areas from industrial (Automobiles, Engineering) to print(Magazine, publications) to Tech companies(Web, Software, Apps). With the relatively recent tech companies focused on creating interfaces for screens, many new design roles have emerged. Job titles like UX or UI designer are confusing and unfamiliar even to designers who come from other industries.
It’s common for designers to use these terms incorrectly sometimes. If you don’t know the difference between UI and UX, in today’s post we’ll describe UX vs UI in depth to get a better understanding of the differences between them.
1. What is UI Design?
Simply UI stands for User Interface. The graphical representation of any application or framework is UI design. UI is what we are seeing in front of us while browsing the websites of using the software and mobile application. The main role of UI designer is to maintain the consistency in the visual elements and defining their behavior. It consists the visual representation of button, text, images, slider, entry fields in the form and many more.
2. What is UX design?
UX stands for User eXperience. What the user can experience or the interaction with the UI design is User Experience. The UX designer determines the functionality and structure of the UI design. The UI Designer designs the button of the web site and the UX designer design how it works and what happens when the user clicks or hover in that button. The pleasure provided in the interaction between the customer and the product.
3. The Case study
Back in the 1970’s or lets’ say in the early age of the computer, you had to use the command line interface if you wanted to use a computer. The graphical interfaces which we use today didn’t exist. For a computer to work, users needed to communicate via programming language, requiring seemingly infinite lines of code to complete a simple task.
After decade in 1980’s the first graphical user interface (GUI) was developed by computer scientists at Xerox PARC. With this breathtaking innovation, users could now interact with their personal computers by visually submitting commands through icons, buttons, menus, and checkboxes.
This shift in technology helped anyone could use a computer, with no coding required, and the personal computer revolution began.
In 1984 Apple released the Macintosh personal computer which included a point and click mouse for the first time in the computer history. The Macintosh became commercially successful home computer to use this type of interface.
If users couldn’t interact with their computers in the way they wanted, they wouldn’t buy it. So as a result, the UI designer was born.
With the growing technology, the UI designer’s role has evolved and has been vast. Now UI designers are not limited just on computer interfaces, but mobile phones, augmented and virtual reality, and even or screenless interfaces like voice, gesture, and light.
Today’s UI designer has nearly unlimited opportunities to work on websites, mobile apps, wearable technology, and smart home devices, software interface just to name a few. There will be the need to make the interfaces as long as computers continue to be a part of daily life.
4. The difference between UI and UX design
UI is focused on how a product’s surfaces or interface looks and function, UX is focused on the user’s journey to solve a problem.
UI designer to focus on the more visual elements, UX designer is concerned with the conceptual aspects.
UI makes interfaces beautiful, UX makes interfaces useful
and UI determines the look while UX searches for solutions
UI is the bridge to go somewhere, UX is the feeling we get there.
5. So, What’s More Important?
The short answer is both.
A beautiful design with no good presentation is going to fail because users are going to hate trying to use the site. But, any site which has great functionality with no focus on design and key notes will fall equally as flat. So we need both hand in hand. They are two coins of the same side. They have to go parallel.
UI vs UX, the conclusion
Some designers or professionals get angry when the topic raises. Some say that the two are completely unrelated and that they shouldn’t be discussed together. While others say that both are same and no need to discuss. Honestly, though, we won’t avoid thinking about one without the other.
After this long discussion what we can conclude is: UI is simply the first thing we can work on as part of UX design. A beautiful design can’t save an interface that’s horrible and confusing to navigate. Likewise a brilliant, perfect user experience can be sunk by bad visual interface design that makes using the app unpleasant.
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UX vs UI in depth: This article might have helped you to understand better about Ux and UI.
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