UI (User interface) vs UX (User Experience) Design

What is UI?

The user interface is the visual representation of anything we see. It could be a product, a website, an application or a machine. UI design helps to create a refreshingly pleasant experience while using a product and it helps to attract more audience. UI designers are the person who studies and design the product to create an effective user experience.

There are some important elements of UI including text, images, videos, animation, documents, buttons, tabs, checkboxes, radio buttons, lists, drop-downs, design, hover and behaviours.

A UI designer must be creative and have a good aesthetic sense. His role is to use his creative skills to build a compelling, beautiful interface that evokes an emotional response from the user.

 

Difference Between UI and UX

UI and UX always work together but there are some differences we all need to understand. In simple words, UI design is the user interface while us refers to the experience of the user. They have a mutual connection in product design but have different roles.

 

Functionality

Both UI and UX overlap but they have a great difference in term of functionality. UX is a method of how things operate and how things seem. In the same way, UI is how things resemble.

 

Focus

The use of prototypes is different between both UI and UX designers. Even many UI designers confuse UI with UX but in simple words, UI designers work on the front end (interface) and the UX designers focus on the back end work.

To understand it properly you can create a user interface to show it to the client, and you can take a prototype created by the UX designers to show it to the developers. UX design entirely depends on research and logic.

 

Colours

UI designers work with proper colour schemes to make things as realistic as possible, UX designers usually use just three black, white and grey colours and sometimes different shades of grey. For example, a UX designer will simply put black and white frames and buttons and will leave a note to the UI designer about what to do, like make the button black on hover, and the UI designer will put his maximum effort to add proper images, colours, buttons, icons and design to make it realistic.

 

Tools

Since both are different and have different roles in design so the tools designers use must be different as well, however, there are a lot of tools that can be used for both purposes. Some tools like Flinto, Adobe XD, Principle and InVision are bound to sketching and have a team collaboration feature so they are good for UI designs.

UX designers will prefer a wireframe as it’s easy to design and draw and make porotypes more efficient. We will list down a bunch of qualified tools you can use for UX design.

  • Figma
  • Adobe XD
  • Framer
  • Sketch
  • io
  • Wonder share
  • Marvel App
  • Axure

 

We have explained enough but still, there might be some confusions so we will end this comparison with a professional note. According to Rahul Varshney, co-creator of Foster.FM:

“User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI) are some of the most confused and misused terms in our field. A UI without UX is similar to a painter slapping paint onto canvas without thinking; while UX without UI is like the frame of a model with no paper match on it. A magnificent product experience begins with UX supported by UI. Both are essential for the product’s success.” 

 

If you looking for Best UI/UX professionals, you can visit Magento 2 Ui/UX Services.