User experience and UI design

A comparison

I see a lot of confusion online about the difference between UI design and UX design. There’s a big difference and although you will come across people who practice both, they are two different disciplines.

The User eXperience (UX) is a sum of all the user interactions that a person has with a product, service or brand. The experience is how the person feels when they react to touch points, how they respond to information and feedback and whether they have been able to do what they set out to achieve.

Experience design is the creation of intentional user interactions with a product, service or brand. These interactions need to have:

• Find-ability — they should be easy to discover
• Functionality — they should do the job the user needs to do
• Usability — they should be easy to access, understand and use.

If the interactions don’t have these, we are in danger of frustrating users. But do these well and we can provoke more positive feelings. And if we reward the user unexpectedly, we can even inspire moments of delight.

The interplay between the interface and the user is reliant on visual design, content design and the behaviour and feedback from the interface.

An aesthetically pleasing visual design goes a long way to satisfying users. People are tolerant of usability issues if the interface is easy on the eye.

This is why User Interface (UI) designers are important — they understand how to craft a visually appealing interface using principles such as unity, balance, hierarchy, contrast, and scale.

A good UI designer uses brand logos, colours, typography and imagery to add credibility to a webpage.

UI designers know to keep the interface simple using recognisable interface elements, layouts and clear language in labels and messaging.

But Experience design is more than visual design, for me it’s about:

• gaining empathy with the user,
• designing intentional interactions and user journeys, and
• prototyping to make sure you build the right thing before you build the thing right.

As an experience designer, ask yourself these questions…

Empathy

• do you have an understanding of what drives human behaviour in this situation?
• do you know what your users’ needs and pain-points are?
• what incremental change will generate value for the user?

Designing intentional interactions

• what is the context that the user finds themselves in?
• how does the user know what to do?
• what’s the most efficient route for the user to achieve their goal?
• how does the user know what’s happening?
• how do we incentivise/give a sense of progress towards the goal?
• how does the user know they have been successful?
• what rewards can we give to the user for reaching a goal?
• how can we give the user closure?

Prototyping

• how can you test your assumptions?
• can you iterate and work out the kinks?
• what outcomes are we looking for and how can we measure them?

If you’re not asking yourself these sort of questions, are you really a UX designer?

Read more…

• Build the right thing before you build the thing right (Why a prototying mindset can derisk investment)