Two terms you’ll often hear discussed in relation to any digital project are UX and UI, but what do these often-confused acronyms stand for and why are they so important?
Let’s get the acronyms out of the way first. UX stands for the User eXperience and UI refers to the User Interface.
Well, there’s been a lot written on this subject, and there are many subtly different takes on this, but this how we at Everything Connected think about it.
Simply put, the “User Experience” can encompass all aspects of the end-user's interaction with the company, its services, and its products.
The “User Interface” is what the user sees. The look and feel of the digital product or service. It refers to the specific visual touch points the user interacts with, and obviously for digital products this plays a big part in the user’s experience.
Let’s take the example of a simple business’ brochure website, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking the design of this website is purely a visual design exercise - is it on brand, do I like these colours, do I like that font? And while this approach can potentially produce a beautiful looking final product, we’re leaving it to chance whether it’s going to be useful and appealing for the user, and therefore successful for the business.
At Everything–Connected we love beautiful things, and we’re passionate visual designers, but we also love our designs to work. That entails properly considering both the UX and UI of a site.
UX is a very broad discipline that can encompass many specific services and outputs. For the purposes of this article, we’ll keep with our simple business website, and outline some of the work and services that make up our UX process for this project.
Thinking about the User Experience happens before any pixels are pushed and designs created. Our process begins with taking a step back and working with the client to ask and answer the following types of questions:
As part of the initial UX exploration we may interview users to get their insights, conduct a competitor analysis, create personas, and review the current website if one exists.
The above work can be broadly grouped as UX research. Now armed with this knowledge we can get into the UX design process, determining how the website will work and how people will interact with it. Simple outputs of this process could include wireframing our site, creating personas and crafting user journeys.
Let’s talk about the User Interface design process by talking about our UI designers.
We take the UI designer discipline very seriously here at E-C, our UI designers have to be great graphic designers who can instinctively work with a brand’s visual identity. They need to really understand what makes a good design, for example, how to use typography, how to communicate with imagery and how to use colour.
Then they also then need to take and really understand the requirements unearthed in the UX process and weave everything together to create the final magical experience.
Some thoughts that might go through our UI designers minds would be:
A great final product requires UX research, a UX design process and a UI design process. You won’t get a great product if any are neglected, and the best results are achieved when they are working brilliantly together.
To that end we never have a hard hand over between one discipline and the other, often the UI process can unearth interesting insights for the UX work, and vice versa.
Plus, the UX work doesn’t end once the UI has been completed, there’s usually plenty of user testing to be done.
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