The involvement and contribution of technology, in today’s day and age, into our daily lives seem almost magical. All we need to do is simply tap a button, swipe right, or just click an icon – and that’s about it! An app or a website does our desired task for us.
But, actually what goes behind the scenes – is a planned amalgamation of digital magic – resulting out of careful and intentional design. This is the power of User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI) design – working in coherent harmony.
Take a look at this breakdown of factors, leading users to leave websites, mostly owing to poor user experience.
Source: Baymard
What do these terms actually mean, though? Are they really that significant to us? And how do they function in synergy to offer convenient digital products for our day-to-day lives?
In this article, we will explore the world of UX and UI – simplifying all the nitty-gritties of these misunderstood terms and explaining how these concepts work to shape our daily digital experiences. Keep reading on to discover how these two complement each other and how both of these are essential in shaping user-centric digital products.
What is UX Design?
User experience design consists of the overall interaction between a product and its users, which can range from anything like a website or a mobile app to a physical commodity like a coffee machine. UX design mainly focuses on factors like how the product feels, how easy and convenient it is to use, and whether it successfully caters to the user’s problem or meets their demands.
Here are some of the essential steps involved in the UX design process.
Source: TechTarget
To understand it better, you can consider UX design to be like the blueprint or architecture of a building.
As is the case for an architect to create a design layout that ensures functionality and smooth usability; a UX designer is responsible for developing frameworks for digital products – focusing on every step of the user journey in using the product. The aim is to make sure that at every touchpoint of the product roadmap, a user feels at ease and gets his/her expectations fulfilled.
Key Responsibilities of a UX Designer
The role of a UX designer is multifaceted – it circles around getting to know the user and improving how they experience a product. Below are some of the main activities that UX designers do:
- User Research and Competitive Analysis: This is before any designing work starts, UX designers indulge in extensive research to understand who their target audience is.
This may entail analyzing user needs, behaviors, pain points, and expectations; as well as performing competitive analysis to see how similar products on the market are behaving and find potential rooms for improvement.
- Wireframing and Prototyping: After finishing the research, wireframes and prototypes are built by UX designers.
Wireframes, however, are simple sketches with only basic elements in them such as lines or boxes that denote the structure and layout of a certain page. This is what one can look like.
Source: Dribble
While prototypes are interactive models that give users the opportunity to test the functionality of a product before it goes into development. A prototype can be represented as something like this.
Source: Figma
- Testing and Iteration: User testing is an integral part of the UX design process. Designers undergo usability tests where real users provide feedback that can be used in redesigning the user journey.
This iterative process ensures that final products meet user needs completely, hence, delivering optimum experiences.
- Collaboration with UI Designers and Developers: UX designers work hand in hand with UI designers, product managers, and developers in order to ensure that the product design and functionality match both user needs and project objectives.
Therefore, there is a need for collaboration when producing a comprehensive and efficient product.
The Goal of UX Design
Ultimately, what UX design wants to achieve are useful products that are even delightful to interact with. This implies thinking about the user at every stage of development so that the result will be a product that has an intuitive interface, can solve problems quickly, and offers a good experience.
Excellent UX design can be the difference in a product – whether it turns out to be a highly enjoyable or an irritating experience.
What is UI Design?
While UX design is concerned with how a product works and its overall experience, user interface design is concerned mainly with how it looks as well as how it feels. While more than 75 percent of baby boomers prefer a simple school of UI designs, nearly 72 percent of millennials interact better with digital assets that offer UI with personalized experiences.
UI design focuses on all aspects of visual representation such as buttons, icons, typography, and color schemes among other things that appear on the screen of our devices. It’s all about designing aesthetically appealing and interactive interfaces that smoothly navigate users through any software application or web-based service.
As the architecture of a building relates to UX design, the interior design language reflects the work scope of a UI designer more. As an interior designer chooses colors, furniture, and decor to create a specific ambiance and ensure the space is functional and inviting, so does a UI designer select the visual elements of a digital product to make it beautiful and easy for everyone to use.
Key Responsibilities of a UI Designer
UI designers are very crucial in making sure that a product’s visual representation has been successfully brought to life and that there is no difficulty in its usage. The following are some of the major responsibilities carried out by these professionals:
- Designing Visual Interface Elements: UI designers create all visual components of a product’s interface like buttons, icons, typography, and color schemes as well as arrange the overall screens’ structure.
Here is an explainer video from Apple on its UI typography details.
Source: Apple
These components work collectively to give an integrated visual experience that both looks good and functions effectively.
- Creating Mockups and Prototypes: Just like UX designers, UI designers can also make prototypes; however, their focus will be on what the final output will look like.
Mockups may include detailed information about how the final layout will appear or act thus providing potential users with access to this data from time to time.
- Ensuring Responsive Design: Essentially, in this multi-device world today it is important that digital products perform properly on various screen sizes and devices such as smartphones, tablets, or desktops.
For instance, take a look at how Dropbox seamlessly makes the most out of a fluid grid design combined with adaptable visuals.
Source: JanBask Digital Design
- Collaborating with Developers: Once the UI design is finalized, it must be implemented by developers. Thus, they have a working relationship with developers where they actualize the visual design correctly and ensure that the final product corresponds to the original design concept.
The Goal of UI Design
The main purpose of user interface design is to create an intuitive visually appealing interface that helps users navigate through the product with ease. Well-designed UIs should indicate what actions can be taken by users and facilitate their tasks without uncertainties.
UI design focuses on making a user interface as easy and enjoyable for end-users as possible, hence, improving user experience generally.
UX and UI – The Perfect Partnership
UX and UI designs have separate roles but are closely related in their interconnectedness which makes them inseparable while creating any successful product. In other words, you can compare UX with one side of a coin and UI with another one.
However, UI’s responsibility is to ensure that the product is visually appealing and user-friendly. Thus, they make up for a complete and enjoyable digital experience.
Interdependence of UX and UI
UX design alone won’t guarantee a successful product. A mobile app with great UX design is easy to navigate, solves users’ problems effectively, and satisfies their needs.
However, even if the underlying functionality is solid, when the UI design is weak – for example, buttons are too tiny, the text is hard to read, or the color scheme is inconsistent – the overall experience will still be negative.
For instance, eBay’s mobile app was once cluttered with every element shouting for attention. The makeover in the design focuses more on product visuals, a simplified bidding, and purchase process.
Source: eBay
On the other hand, poor UX but beautiful UI design also doom a product. Even if an app looks marvelous and possesses stunning visuals; it can quickly become irritating for users if one finds it difficult to navigate, confusing, or does not meet their needs at all.
So, in this case, the products’ attraction will rely on its appearance which may bring some customers initially but they won’t stay around due to bad user experience.
A balance between UX and UI design holds the key to success. UX design establishes the ground by ensuring that the product solves users’ problems and delivers a seamless, intuitive experience. UI design takes off from there to make it beautiful and easy for users to interact with.
Real-World Example: A Mobile App
To demonstrate how UX and UI relate, let’s use a mobile banking app as an example. The work of the UX designer entails allowing users to easily check their account balance, transfer money, and pay bills. It is concerned with the overall application flow so that each step makes sense and can be done in a reasonable amount of time.
On the other hand, as far as functionality is concerned, the UI designer pays attention to the appearance of each screen. For instance, they align colors with bank branding; design buttons that are easily spotted; and select typography that can be read well but is not distracting. They also ensure that their app looks good on smaller smartphone screens as well as larger tablet screens.
Let’s take a look at this example of the Fi Money app.
Source: App Store
The resulting app designed by both UX and UI designers offers more than mere functionality: it is aesthetically pleasing and user-friendly too. Users would complete their tasks without annoyance while using this application, thus, giving them a positive experience altogether.
The Key Differences Between UX and UI
While UX and UI work in tandem to produce great products, they have distinct roles to play. Understanding these differences is important for appreciating the unique contributions of each field.
Focus Areas
UX Design: UX design focuses on the overall user journey and how the product works. It has more to do with strategy, structure, and solving user problems.
The UX designers are responsible for understanding users’ needs, building wireframes and prototypes, conducting user testing as well as iterating on the design, so as to improve the overall functionality of a product.
Source: Designlab
UI Design: Conversely, UI design concentrates on the visual aspects and interactivity of a product; it is all about aesthetics, user interaction, or creating a visually consistent experience.
Creating buttons, icons, typographies along with color schemes is part of their mandate in addition to making sure that they have made a responsive product that can be used visually.
Process Differences
The UX Process: Often this commences by studying and analyzing the requirements of user research. UX designers make wireframes and prototypes, get them tested by users, and refine their designs based on feedback received from end-users.
This effort must result in problem-solving products that offer seamless experiences from start to finish.
The UI Process: In the process of user interface development, priority is given to making the product more visually appealing. This means that UI designers take the wireframes and prototypes created by the UX team and change them into high-fidelity designs, ensuring that they match brand visuals and are easy to use.
As a result, this involves choosing color schemes, fonts, and layouts as well as making it responsive on different devices.
The Symbiotic Relationship Between UX and UI
While both UX and UI have different focuses and ways of achieving their goals, they are closely intertwined and must work in harmony to create successful digital products. The symbiosis between UX and UI can thus be viewed as one where each needs the other to be successful.
Source: Factory
UX without UI: For example, imagine a product that solves users’ problems but whose visual design is so confusing or unattractive that users find it challenging to interact with such a system. A bad user interface will dilute even a strong user experience, thus rendering a product hard in usability.
UI without UX: On the other hand, there could be an app that looks exciting with intuitive elements of the interface though its features may not make sense at all or fail to meet user requirements. With time, users quickly become disinterested as they find it hard to navigate through the website.
For the most successful digital products, UX and UI need to be addressed with equal importance to ensure that the product is both functionally correct and elegant in its design; solving user problems while at the same time amazing them with a seamless, intuitive interface.
Summing Up
Users these days have countless options: some products may fail or succeed based on their user experience quality. In making user-centered products, both UX and UI designs are extremely important since each has its own set of strengths.
UX design ensures that the product is simple to understand, effective in achieving goals, and solves user problems. It builds up a great experience taking into account the systematization of information flow and logic of the service itself. UI design brings out a visual appeal and interactivity for the enjoyable use of any product. It improves UX by providing clear aesthetic interfaces aimed at making interaction straightforward and fun throughout the whole system.
The adoption of the dynamic duo of UX and UI can lead to the creation of efficient and effective digital experiences. The end goal is to offer pleasant encounters through these digital offerings, helping build strong and lasting relationships with the end users.
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Written By: ISHAN BARMAN
