Learn about the differences between UI and UX (and which might be a better career for you).
Think of yourself as the customer’s advocate, always looking for ways to improve the customer’s experience. Let’s take a look at some of the tasks and responsibilities you’ll likely encounter throughout the design process. People sometimes confuse the two, but UI is actually a specialized subset of UX. According to Figma Designer Advocate Hugo Raymond, engaging UI lays the foundation for a positive overall user experience with a digital product or website. “Effective user interface design brings together usability and interactive design to build an emotive connection between users and products,” he explains. Like user experience design, user interface design is a multi-faceted and challenging role.
UI/UX Tools
But like UX, it is easily and often confused by the industries that employ UI designers—to the extent that different job posts will often refer to the profession as completely different things. Read on to learn more about the differences between UI and UX, how they work together, their respective tasks, responsibilities, salaries, and more. If you want easy recruiting from a global pool of skilled candidates, we’re here to help. Our graduates are highly skilled, motivated, and prepared for impactful careers in tech. While UI and UX often go hand-in-hand with one another, they aren’t exactly the same thing. One deals much more with the intangible aspects of a product’s use, while the other focuses more heavily on the mechanics.
That’s why, as you can see, UX and UI design work together, not against each other. Likewise, UX design deals with the emotional side of things, the qualitative elements. UX design focuses on streamlining the usage in accordance with what the user needs (or what the site/app managers want to highlight). UX is more involved with the abstract, such as how to make ui ux designer interactions as painless as possible. It deals with the look and placement of the controls, although the user’s preferences (which fall under UX) should still influence these aspects. Still, UI design is more concerned with the quantitative elements, such as how many pixels the width of a button should be, or what precise color code to use for the button.
UI vs. UX: Two Very Different Disciplines that Work in Harmony
In short, this type of design helps users have a positive experience. Generally, UX and UI designers get paid almost the same, so it’s a matter of which role you prefer. As we mentioned, you might see a position for “UI/UX designer,” so you may find yourself doing both at some point.
If a user gave the new design a low score, the team used Survey Logic to ask open-ended follow-up questions to understand why the user gave the dashboard a low rating. In the iteration stage, your team will continue to make updates and improvements as needed, and closely monitor how those changes impact the product experience. Google’s Foundations of User Experience (UX) Design is the first course in its popular UX design series that you can take alone. It provides a peek into different UX design careers and the design thinking process.
UX vs UI: What is UX design?
Look for a course or program where you’ll learn the fundamentals, get hands-on experience with the latest UX design tools, complete projects for your portfolio, and network with others in the industry. Working as a UX designer means you can apply your creativity and analytical skills in a wide range of fields that might interest you. Your work will vary from day to day and project to project, allowing you to continually learn and grow throughout your career. User experience (UX) designers work to optimize the interaction between humans and products. For UX design, there are a number of paid courses, of courses from online universities.
That’s not to say that UI design is all about looks; UI designers have a huge impact on whether or not a product is accessible and inclusive. Eventually, they’ll create wireframes that set out the bare-bones blueprints for the product. Despite it being an older and more practiced field, the question “What is user interface design? ” is difficult to answer because of its broad variety of misinterpretations.
UI vs. UX salary
When designing the UX of a product, several aspects need to be thought over. Together, they make up the “why, what, and how” of a product’s use. This content has been made available for informational purposes only.
- To develop products, you’ll conduct competitor analyses and craft product strategies.
- “Graphic designers often own responsibilities for brand alignment, and will help provide some brand guidelines to build UI,” Hugo says.
- Even after a digital product has entered the market, a UX designer’s job is never truly done.
Emil Lamprecht is the founder of multiple social impact (and other) companies, and research advocate at Yleos, a lightweight qualitative research tool. A founding team member and former CMO of CareerFoundry, Emil also authored CareerFoundry’s original UX courses and related articles. He takes great joy in creating overly detailed analogies in his writing.
Now we have a clear-cut definition of both UX and UI, let’s consider the key differences between the two. You can learn all about the fascinating history of UX design in this article. If you’ve been wondering about the difference between UX design and UI design, you’re not alone. Often used interchangeably, they actually describe very different things. There are other aspects that you have to consider and plan for, such as responsive design. Get started with User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) Design and learn how to wireframe and prototype using Figma.
Give your team the skills, knowledge and mindset to create great digital products. When designing controls, you should consider the goals of both UI and UX. For example, on phone apps and mobile versions of websites, buttons and controls are often placed on the bottom.
UX designers are generally involved in the earlier phases of a product design since they need to design the flow of activities that take place when a user needs to solve a problem. While UI design and UX design require very different skill sets, they are both important components that must work in harmony to give the best experience to end users. A UI (User Interface) deals with the application’s graphical layout, which includes buttons, screen layout, animations, transitions, micro-interactions, and so on. The soft skills you need for both roles are virtually the same and would be beneficial in both jobs. This list is not exhaustive but highlights some key soft and hard UX and UI design skills. If you’re doing UX design, it would be helpful to have some UI skills, especially for projects with low time and resources.
