Who doesn’t like a visually appealing and easy-to-use website? Ever wonder how that happens? Such websites result from having a good User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI).
Only a website with good UI and UX design can offer visitors the best user experience and customer satisfaction. It signifies that both UI and UX are the essential components for website development. They complement each other, and both are equally important.
To develop a website that emphasizes both UI/UX design, one first needs to know about the difference between the two. But before talking about the difference between the two, let’s first understand the terms UX vs UI first.
Meaning of UX and UI
Often, UX and UI design get overlapped, so it’s easy to get confused between the two although they represent different components of design. The meaning of the term UX is “user experience”, whereas UI means “user interface”.
Basically, UI comprises all the visual elements that enable users to interact with your product or service easily and efficiently. UX, whereas, is the overall experience of the individual with the product or service. Thus, UI is just a part of UX. However, UI being an extremely important part, has an impact on UX and thus should not be missed.
Imagine cake. We all love cakes, right?
🍒 Are their cherries on the top? Looks appealing, right? That’s UI! The look and feel of the cake makes you want to eat it!
🍽 When we eat a cake and find it sweet, tasty, creamy? That’s UX.
Thus, for you to experience the cake, the cake(interface) should look yummy and fancy.
How are UI and UX Related?
Say your website is loaded with unique, helpful content organized in a logical and intuitive way. But if the website isn’t accessible between screens, users will likely leave the site, resulting in the loss of customers. This is where UI design comes into play. Without a good UI, the content on the website won’t adjust according to the screen size and users won’t be able to see the content properly.
Let’s understand the difference between UI and UX with another example.
Consider a website with product reviews. Even if the UI, that is the user interface , for finding a product on the website is smooth and perfect. The UX, that is user experience, will be poor for a user who wants to know about a small and lesser-known product that’s not listed on the website. Because the website’s database only contains products from the major brands.
UX vs. UI: Key Differences
- UI design determines the visuals of a website, mobile app, or software product. UX determines how the delivered product solves the problems or pain points for the user.
- UI design is solely about the digital interactions with the product on a computer, smartphone, or tablet. UX is about all types of interactions with target users.
- User interface (UI) design puts heavy emphasis on software performance. User experience (UX) design encapsulates the entire customer journey.
Simply put,
If UI design focuses on creating a pleasant experience on the website interface, UX design focuses on the overall feel of the experience with the website and service.
UI Designer vs UX Designer
Both UI and UX designers have significant roles to play in the product development lifecycle. Let’s see what they do in detail.
UX designers look into the business needs, analyze the user behavior, and design products or solutions that appeal to the target users. Their focus is to build functional, accessible, and enjoyable products to use.
Their tasks include–
- Conducting user research to identify any goals, needs, behaviors, and pain points involved with the product interaction.
- Developing user personas based on target customers.
- Analyze how a customer interacts with a product.
- Collaborating with stakeholders, UI designers, and developers.
Whereas Ul designers deal with the appearance and feel of the product, including colors, texture, shape, and form. UI designers implement the visual and interactive elements focusing on making the website more intuitive and responsive. They use their design skills to create interfaces that are easy for users to follow. UI can be applied only to digital products. Here are the tasks of a UI Designer-
- Organizing page layouts.
- Choosing color palettes and fonts.
- The use of UI elements, such as scrollers, buttons, toggles, drop-down menus, and text fields.
- Make various wireframes and layouts to show what the final design will look like.
- Collaborating with developers to make working products out of the designs.
Conclusion
Developing a good website that is liked by people requires both good UI and good UX. It’s worth investing in UI and UX because the customer spends on the product or service so it’s on you to ensure that they have a smooth customer experience because that’s going to drive revenue for your company.
Do you want to improve the UI, and UX of your website, product or service? Get help from professional website designer and developer today!!
