I recently had an in depth conversation with a friend who is a UX designer, and we got into talking about the differences between UX and UI. I decided to take what we talked about, and turn his insights into a great overview of the positions.
First thing is UI and UX are two different positions.
I think a lot of people tend to mix the two up more often than not. I’ve gone into several interviews with major companies where they posted looking for a UI designer and in reality they were looking for a UX designer or vice versa.
UI design is more focus around the interface and the way the user interacts with the application or website. Their primary focus are things like interaction patterns, layouts, colors, UI Kits, etc. It’s important that they visually communicate to the end user, the path that the UX designer has laid out for the end product user.
UX design is more focused on research & business objectives. We are very goal oriented! We’re always asking the 5 W’s Who, What, Why, Where, When and How. We love questions. We’re advocates for the end user! (People that are using the product) So what does this mean? Basically a UX designer goes out and finds out as much information about the people (end user) that will be using the product all why listening, testing and confirming with those people that the decisions make sense.
UX Designers are always documenting our findings (research) so later we have rationale or a good reason for company/stakeholders as to why we made the decisions that we made, and why it’s important we move forward in creating the product.
For most UX designers, the first question when given a project or product to work on is to ask their team what is the goal? what is the purpose for us creating this product? The reason this question is so important is because this will set the foundation for your research. Everything you read, you test, you design is to validate this goal. In order find validation for this goal there are several methods or processes that many UX designers use.
The following is a very brief description of what we use at my current employment and it’s not the end all say all but more of brief summary for you to have a understanding of what it is we do.
We start out by understanding the competitor and what’s currently out there. And how others are doing it better or worst. We call this competitor’s analysis, we create surveys, we do lots and lots of interviews with the user of our products, we create card sorting exercises, we user test and ask lot and lots of questions as to why the users likes or dislike the product. (More goes into it) Once we start our research and feel we know what our user are asking and what our competitors are doing we move to understanding our platform.
It’s important for us to have a clear understanding of the platform (foundation in which our product is design on) and have clear understanding of what it’s capable and not capable of. This is usually when we get our developers involved and they help us have a better understanding of what our software is can do. We ask question like, “Are their better platforms out there? Are there new technologies that we should be using?” In order to have a better understanding we create use cases, information architecture, site maps, and flowcharts. We also give structure to content (content is everything that will be going into the product or site: Images, Media, Site Links, PDF, Videos, Widgets, Documents, Reports) again a lot more steps but this is a summary.
After doing all this we create conceptual wireframes form the information or research that we’ve gathered and start to lay out that research in visual way and start to visualize how the data is going to visually flow. We create workflows and rough wireframe sketches of what our research has led us to. We present the information to stakeholder and most of the time several iterations are made before we go into prototyping.
Finally, in our prototyping (a mimic or rough duplicate of what the real product is going to be) we start designing. I think that’s this is where the misconception about UX designers come into play. Because we have designer in our title, most people think we are designing all day long. In reality, we design close to the end of our process. Secondly, design is probably 10% if not 5% of what we do.
Anyways, we create prototypes with visual appeal and interactions to make them close to the real thing. Some designers choose to create HTML wireframes and others chose to use interaction applications that make it feel like the real deal.
Once your finished with that we hand it over to a developer to start the development process and once again we go out and test it! We bring that end user back that we interviewed at the beginning and maybe bring some new ones to make sure we got it right. We usually never get the product right the first time, so we make it iterations to the prototype and do testing all over again until our research says it’s correct.
Once the prototype is done, we test it again and makes sure we get out all bugs from the system or platform. Usually by then we find a company that we think would be good guinea pig to use as a beta tester and, yup you got it, we test it again and fully functional product to makes sure that what were about to give to world works.
Again this is a really rough outline of what a UX designer is and does but at the end of the day if you like research this is the job for you. If you want to focus more on designing than you might want to go into a visual design.
Here’s a brief description in the difference between a UI and visual designer.
A visual designer is a glorified Graphic Designer but for web. They have a niche for making things eye catching. They’re more of a production artist designing things like layouts, buttons, colors, typography that the UI designer has strictly laid out to provide rules for them. They follow what the UI designers have created as a pattern for design. Usually UI designer utilize them as their helpers in doing production work. UI designer lays out the rules for visual designer as to what the application or website is going to look like and how the user will interact with the application or website.
Here’s the food chain of command: UX Designer- At Top UI Designer – Close to top but not quite (Below UX designer) Visual Designer – Trying to pay his or her dues to reaching the TOP. (Bottom)