There is a widespread development in technology and more people are coming in to adopt the upcoming technologies and also the ones that are prevailing. In the field of Design also more people are getting involved in new design fields like User interface design and user experience design commonly known as UI/UX design. Other such similar fields include product design, graphic design and web design. People often get confused about ui ux design and often think that it is both the same. Same goes with the graphic design and web design. Thus, you need to have knowledge about them all including the design skills and design process to know what it entails for your career.
Here is the difference between UI/UX design, graphic design, web design which would help in clarification and easy understanding of them all.
What is User Experience Design?
UX design stands for User experience design and it is the relationship building process between a company, its products with the customers through the websites and mobile applications.
It tends to be the invisible side of the design. UX design includes user research and design amalgamation, information, interaction design. It also includes usability testing through the design and how the content has been formulated or strategized. UX design focuses on the users and the customers to understand their needs, behaviors and emotions. The design solutions needs to take care of all such customer habits and needs. You need to know and understand the problems and design while taking care of who your potential customers are. Then only you must proceed to create prototypes to find out whether it is good for the end users interaction with the company and its services or not.
Basically UX design is something that can be experienced. In layman term it is the interaction between the user and the product just like you have it with a coffee machine, a chair or any other product or service. A UX designer should design keeping in mind how the experience makes the user feel and how the user can do the desired task easily. For example: How to easily browse for the clothes online while knowing the number of product along with the price they have added to the cart. They consider elements like visual design and interface design. UX designer training is done with user experience certification on various online courses available.
In short, the UX designer must know how to make easy, efficient and relevant all round pleasant experience for the user. There are various user experience design courses available online for help.
UX Designer Skills Required:
- It is improving the quality of interaction between the users and the company.
- It does not focus on visuals and based on the experience felt by the users.
- They structure and strategize the product and develop content along with the user research.
- They need to prototype for testing and iterations.
- They need to analyse and execute according to the test results
- Responsible for how users interact online and offline including customer service.
- It is a problem solving job for designers and developers.
What Is User Interface Design?
The user interface design or UI design is the visual appearance of the product or design. The UI designers ensure how the product is effective for the users. They need to have a good sense of aesthetics, need to be creative and know the technical skills. In UI design the interface must be appealing and beautiful that builds the emotional quotient of the user. It is basically the skin of a product that forms the personality of the brand. The goal is to visually guide users through the interface.
The elements of UI design include images, videos, texts, graphics designs, info graphics, checkboxes, etc. In simple words, UI design is the visual appeal of any website or the mobile application that you see.
UI Designer Skills Required:
- They are responsible for the look, feel and interactivity of the website.
- Responsible for adaptation to all devices including mobile screens.
- Branding and graphic development, design research and animation are made by the ui designers.
- They need to do proper implementation with the developer including prototyping.
- They need to design icons and buttons along with proper color schemes.
- They are responsible for transferring product development, user research into attractive and guiding user experience for the users.
User experience and User Interface are one of the most confused terms and are often used together which makes even more confusion. Here are the differences between user interface design and user experience design.
Remember UX is followed by UI design
- UI design is how things look and UX design is how things work. UX without UI design is the frame only with no sculpture filling.
- They have different use of prototyping. UX designers think that logic should come first whereas a UI designer thinks that the prototype should be hi-fi. UI designers are front end developer and UX designer focuses on back end.
- UI designers design in full color whereas UX designers make wireframe in black and white or gray.
- For UI designers, designing image is important with proper aesthetics but UX designer saves time and focus on efficiency.
- UX makes interface useful and make emotional connections with the users and UI design makes interface appealing.
- UX design is all about userability, user research, user stories and personas whereas UI design is all about layout, visual design and branding.
- UI design focuses on icon development, info graphics, and interactivity through colors and appeal whereas UX design is based on user understanding, interaction model, psychology and personas.
Salary Of UI/UX Designers
A UI designer earns $60,000 annually and a UX designer earns $ 75,000 annually.
Useful Resources and courses for UI/UX Design
UI design blogs and courses: UI Parade, Mockups, Invision Blog. Courses on websites like Coursera and Udemy you will find various courses online and free courses for learning UI Design.
UX Design blogs and courses: UX Magazine, UX booth, Smashing magazine.
UI/UX Design goes hand in hand because a company requires both so as to create a website or an application. Both are interlinked. Both are crucial.
What Is Web Design?
A web designer is a creative person who is passionate for coding. Web design involves all parts of the brand to create an online foundation. They include colors, interface, and online pages that users will remember. This is the starting point of UI and UX design to bring the brand to life. It requires strong skills and knowledge of HTML, CSS and JavaScript. It brings in ideas to further develop a brand online. Web designers need to know coding for constructing a website. They do graphic designing tasks too.
Web designers might be visual designers or engineers who build the aesthetics of the websites and bring into life the UI and UX design developed. They need to have the knowledge of web designing packages like Flash, Photoshop, etc. They use experience designer to help them with proper structure required for coding. They are the umbrella that compiles everything a UI/UX designer has developed into highly efficient websites. They get an average salary of $49,000.
What Is Graphic Design?
Traditional Graphic design is something which has to deal with creating icons, images and buttons for the website or mobile application. They make pictures which are required for ui and ux design and for web development through coding. Graphic designers work to design patterns also. They need to have pixel perfection in their work. Graphic designers use Illustrator and Photoshop for It has a small role to play and generally is done by the UI designers. They include transition from graphic design to UI design in case of designing for web. They know how to transition from graphic design to UI design.
So, a UX designer looks to functions and userability and a UI designer focus on looks whereas a web designer puts it all together to make a complete website through coding. A graphic designer has a small part to do which is designing images and info graphics required by the UI designer.