UI and UX are often grouped and used in the same way, even though they are different design areas. And in recent years, there has been a lot of talk of user interface and experience, and it seems that due to the popularity of the design world, anyone can be a UI / UX designer. User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) are often interchangeable, they are so closely linked that many people are confused by their different meanings and definitions. This article aims to clarify a bit more what UI/UX is and the importance of the field for a product’s or service’s success

User experience design is a human-first way of designing products.

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“UX encompasses all aspects of the end-user’s interaction with the company, its services, and its products”

says– Don Norman, Cognitive Scientist & User Experience Architect, the one who first introduced the term.

Regardless of its medium whether is tech or not, UX Design encompasses all the interactions between a customer and a company. As a scientific process it could be applied to anything: Places, cars, furnitures and so on. However, despite being a scientific term, its use since the beginning has been almost entirely within digital fields; one reason for this being that the tech industry started blowing up around the time of the term’s invention.

Essentially, user experience applies to anything that can be experienced—a website, a toaster, or a visit to the supermarket. The “user experience” part refers to the interaction between the user and a product or service. It considers all the different elements that shape this experience. A UX designer thinks about how the experience makes the user feel, and how easy it is for the user to accomplish their tasks. For example:  Can you easily find the product you were looking for? How easy was the checkout process? The ultimate purpose of UX design is to create easy, efficient, relevant, and all-round pleasant experiences for the user, and it is NOT about visuals.

While user experience is a combination of tasks focused on the optimisation of a product for effective and enjoyable use, user interface design is its complement:

UI is the look and feel, the presentation and interactivity of a product.

The user interface is the visual appearance of the product, it is the screen or page with which the user interacts that is being designed. The UI design is about how the product is visually designed to ensure an effective user experience. Is about the look and feel of screens and pages with which users interact, making sure that the user interface visually communicates the way the UX is supposed to be.

The user experience determines how the buttons are best organised to facilitate your goals, as more buttons are needed to take you from page to page, and the user interface decides how to customise the design to fit the new layout. For example, in some user interfaces and design patterns, selecting different buttons based on their effectiveness, such as buttons of different sizes and colours, will give you a better and more familiar experience.

User interface design is an important subset of UX design, and therefore designers work closely together to provide a positive experience for users. For this reason, UX and UI design work hand in hand to provide the best experience for users, not only for the user interface, but for all aspects of the product.

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