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We often divide UI and UX or User Interface and User Experience as separate things. This kind of label has brought misconceptions in the community. As a result, some may think you can do UI without UX and vice versa.
While landing jobs as a UI designer may be feasible with strong visual skills alone, the untold truth is that lacking user experience training puts important limitations on your career growth and the impact of your work.
I will differentiate between these ideas of UI and UX in this post. I hope that after reading it, you will have a more solid understanding of this field.
What is UI
As the name suggests, UI or user interface is everything you see and interact with. It includes color, buttons, layout, and other elements of the product.
What is UX
UX or user experience encompasses everything about the end-to-end interaction users have with a product. This includes usability, performance, and accessibility. It considers cognitive and emotional factors like branding, marketing, and the overall user satisfaction level.
In more simple terms, UX measures how easy it is to use the product.
Reality: UI IS UX
When you design a product, you are making it for humans. Each decision you make, you have to make it based on your consideration for users.
In other words, you need to understand the users to justify your design decision. How else can you articulate your design decision without having good UX skills? For example, when your project managers or interviewers ask why you made such a big button you can’t explain that everyone is also doing it.
User Interface (UI) is essentially how we perceive design visually. What makes a design appealing? One key factor is that it should be easy for users to understand and navigate.
So, it’s fair to say that UI is a part of UX.
The better you understand your users, the more effective your design will be. While people often associate UX skills with research and data analysis, not all UX skills are necessary for a career in user interface design.
How UX helps UI designer
You should strive to become skilled in both visual design aspects as well as understanding user behavior. Being knowledgeable in UX can bring many benefits, to name a few:
Increase conversion: By understanding customers’ behaviors, you can make strategically targeted decisions to drive higher conversion rates. For example, you can optimize the calls-to-action button based on what is known to resonate most with users.
Expand career growth: As technology keeps evolving, the need for user-centered design is growing. UX skills are super in demand and can lead to all kinds of career paths, from design to product management and strategy.
Help you to articulate your design decisions: Having a solid UX base is the first step that helps you to better articulate your decision, whether to the manager, stakeholders, or clients.
At the end of the day, UX and UI should have a symbiotic relationship – each informs and elevates the other. Following user-centered best practices in UX ultimately results in interfaces people love to use.
What aspect of UX should you learn?
Here are some key UX skills that can help take your UI design to the next level:
Cognitive Psychology: Understanding how people process and retain information can guide your interface structure and content presentation. Factors like visual hierarchy, spacing, and grouping help highlight information and make it align with users’ expectations.
User Motivation and Behavior: Gaining insights into what drives user actions and decisions allows you to design for their inherent behaviors and goals. Nudges and cues can encourage optimal workflows that feel intuitive.
Emotional Design: Interfaces evoke emotions that influence engagement. Learning how visual elements like color and imagery impact feelings of comfort, confidence, and satisfaction empowers you to set the right tone.
Persuasive Techniques: Borrowing from methods proven to motivate behavior allows for targeted calls to action that feel natural rather than pushy. Social cues and strategic language subtly guide users toward valued outcomes. Understanding what motivates users can give you tools to create designs that can increase conversion.
Example of UX aspect in UI
UX and UI go hand in hand. Each element in a product should be created with a clear purpose.
For example, to create a high-converting e-commerce site, you must apply principles of human psychology and design best practices.
- Cognitive load – The navigation menu uses clear, consistent labeling and logical grouping to reduce cognitive load for users. Related options are clustered meaningfully.
- Visual hierarchy – Important calls to action like “checkout” employ larger font sizes and strategic placement to guide users’ eyes to critical elements.
- Accessibility – Color contrast meets WCAG guidelines. Text can be enlarged without loss of layout/content. Closed captions benefit deaf users.
- Content formatting – Scannable page layout, headings, lists, and white space optimize skimming and scanning of dense support articles or policies.
- Errors – Friendly error messages suggest solutions instead of confusing technical language. No dead-ends leave users helpless.
These illustrate how applying UX principles related to cognition, usability, accessibility and more can positively impact interface design.
UI/UX and Customer Experience
What makes you loyal to a brand or keeps you coming back to your favorite diner? It can be that it’s more convenient, the price is cheaper, the quality of products is better, or you like the services provided. All of these factors fall under customer experience.
The term “customer experience” is sometimes mistakenly used interchangeably with “user experience,” but it encompasses much more. A customer’s experience with a company considers their entire journey – how they discover the brand through marketing, their interactions during purchase and support, and every touchpoint in between.
For example, when you buy a pair of shoes, the customer experience begins when an advertisement catches your eye. It continues as you enter the physical store to browse options in person and engage with sales associates. The sale itself marks another milestone, as does any follow-up services such as deliveries, returns, or warranty support after the fact.
User experience refers specifically to when you browse their website or mobile app to look for shoes.
While important, user experience represents only one moment in the larger relationship between the customer and the brand. It is focused on interacting with the product, whereas customer experience considers the people and services involved as well. Both are crucial, as the sum of all experiences determines whether a customer chooses to remain loyal long-term or look elsewhere.
Conclusion
While it is still possible for you to apply for your first UI design job without extensive knowledge of UX, in the long run, you will face challenges if you only focus on visual polish.
UI refers to what users perceive and interact with in a design through observation and interaction. How you arrange and design interface elements can greatly impact how people use products. In this way, it’s not incorrect to say that UI is UX.
The two concepts are closely intertwined. Lacking UX skills can hinder your ability to create good products, collaborate effectively with colleagues, and expand your career growth opportunities.
Nowadays, more companies are using the term “product designer” as the lines between user interface (UI) design and user experience (UX) design have begun to blur. So I hope you will consider this post a kind of call to arms to improve all of your skills related to the UX/UI field, rather than just focusing on the visual aspects of products.
