UX vs UI Design: What’s the Difference?

UX vs UI Design: What’s the Difference?

By Scarlett Payne   |    November 10, 2020

WEB DESIGN

Keeping the User in Mind 

Keeping the User in Mind 

Great UI can boost conversion rates by 200%, and great UX can boost them by 400%. 88% of users are unlikely to return to a website after a bad experience. 70% of unsuccessful online businesses attribute failure to bad usability.   75% of users judge credibility by content presentation alone.

What Is UX 

UX (user experience) deals with the internal experience a user has while engaging with your company. It’s rooted in thoughts, impressions and psychology. Thus, UX design exists to improve on anything that the user can experience. To improve user experience, a UX designer maps out the user journey to identify what problems a user has and how to solve them.

7 Elements of Good UX Design 

Usefulness: It serves a purpose. Usability: It’s easy to achieve the objective. Value: It offers value to the user and provider. Desirability: It compels users. Discoverability: It’s easy to find and navigate. Accessibility: Anyone can use it. Credibility: The user trusts it.

What Is UI 

UI (user interface) includes all aspects of a website’s functioning that lets a person interact with it. UI is a subsegment of UX. UI is the means; UX is the reason and result. Look and feel falls to UI design. It includes web pages, buttons, icons, typography, spacing, color scheme, imagery, interactive design and responsive design.  

5 Elements of Good UI Design

Clarity: The purpose is clear. Familiarity: Design is based on what users know. Consistency: Usage patterns and branding are constant. Forgiveness: User mistakes are easy to fix. Efficiency: It takes little effort to use.

The Difference: A Piece of Cake

Understanding the difference comes down to a piece of cake: When serving your user a delectable cake, UI is the ingredients, icing and silverware. UX is why they want to eat the cake at all. You can have good UI and bad UX: Your cake looks beautiful but tastes terrible. Or good UX and bad UI: It tastes delicious but you don’t have a fork to eat it with.

UX vs UI: You Need Both

UX vs UI: You Need Both

With the confusion surrounding the terms, it’s easy to ask one person to cover the role of the other, but UI and UX designers have very different skill sets and functions.

UX Roles Include: 

User and competitor research Strategy development Content  development Wireframe development Prototyping and testing Tracking and analytics

UI Roles Include: 

Design research Graphic design Branding translation to product User guides UI Prototyping Interactivity and responsiveness