The difference between UI and UX designers
You commonly see the acronym UI, that means User Interface, slapped together with UX, an acronym that means User Experience. You see recruiters posting jobs for UI/UX designers, you see products aimed to UI/UX designers, and so on, but did you know you that you don’t necessarily need to be both a UI designer and a UX designer?
Today in this article I’m going to explain the difference between UI and UX.
What does a UX designer do?
A user experience designer, as the name indicates, is a designer that should care, more than anything else, about the user‘s experience with the final product.
A UX designer’s job is to understand the requirements, figure out the problem, and research. To create user personas, for example, first time user, returning user, and define use cases and journeys for those user personas.
It is his/her job to produce diagrams and flows to validate ideas, to create wireframes and usable mockups to do user testing.
A UX designer should always use two methods while assessing the requirements and writing a brief for a project:
- What-How-Why (Here’s an article from Interactive Design foundation)
- Obvious-Easy-Possible (Here’s an article by Jason Fried)
As you can see, a UX designer is a thinker, the person that hands out a bullet proof idea for the UI designers, and later, developers bring to life.
What does a UI designer do?
Simply put, a UI designer is the person that realises an idea into something that can be seen and sometimes interactive.
It is a UI designer’s job to create wireframes, mockups, designs, of everything required for the project at hand.
A UI designer should always ask for feedback, validate and test his/her designs with real users.
A great UI designer is also quick to realise repetition and from that make sure everything and everyone is productive; It should create frameworks from his/her designs and create reusable components to help with keeping the same visual style throughout the product.
While the UX designer is the thinker of how something is going and should be used, the UI designer is the person that gives life to those ideas and makes them usable and beautiful to look at.
Conclusion
Next time you see a job opening for a UI/UX designer, you will now understand what they are asking for. They really want a person to be the ultimate designer, to have the skills to think, question, test and validate his/her ideas, as well as the skills to implement those ideas.
I hope this article helps you distinguish between the two and stops any confusion about what is expected from those two different roles.
Thank you for taking the time to read this short article. Keep on solving problems!
