Credit: David Travis

UX vs. UI & Sub-Categories

This is one of the most common interview questions, and in the early days I would say, “UX includes UI” - But now? Not so much! Although they’re not mutually exclusive, 2 for the price of 1 doesn’t necessarily lead to a better product. The maturity of the field has expanded into a lot of distinguished areas and the strengths of individual designers is starting to coalesce into more specialized areas as well.

I’ve had a lot of experience working in a variety of related job titles, and experiencing the nuanced differences in how they function. Here is a list of UX sub-areas and their loose definitions:

• UI Designer — These people require more artistic sensibilities, inspiration and a background firmly in the arts. Commonly they come from Graphic Design, Illustration/Animation, Visual Design, Creative Direction, Motion Design and more. They are responsible for implementing a robust design system and maintaining UI libraries. They design beautiful webpages that are a pleasure to use, coming off the foundations and requirements defined by researchers.
• UX Designers — These people have an understanding and appreciation for UI Design, but they might prefer to partner with a UI Designer and handle more of the testing, workshop facilitation and creation of lo-fi wireframes to hand-off to people who are more creatively inspired. They will define the information architecture, the way people navigate through the end-to-end experience, who the users are and what their pain points are, biggest opportunities to solve them, and including other considerations like CALD audiences (people who speak english as an additional language), localisation for different countries, icon styles that make the most sense, and legal considerations like WCAG.
• UX/UI Designer — These are what we call in Canada “jack of all trades” or in Australia “all-rounders”. I used to think they were more conjoined than how I feel now. More often than not, a UX/UI Designer gets into a job, and doesn’t do any UX, they only do UI. The business is apprehensive to include budget for user testing, and might only conduct moderated usability tests once per year with a lot of nervousness. They don’t tend to value the research as much, but want a UI Designer who can find creative workarounds with more quantitative data sources, and perhaps a less iterative (going back to the drawing board), less agile (rolling changes) approach. Designs are more one-off and sent live as an experiment instead of beta-testing before they’re developed. The risk is building something that doesn’t solve the problems, because they were misdiagnosed. The benefit is being able to pitch the business value for a holistic approach, and helping the business understand which parts of the UX/UI spectrum they value most.
• UX Researcher — High fiving the Agile facilitators, these people can have a lot in common. UX Researchers are less on the inward-facing business operations side, and moreso on the outward-facing user research side. They make friends with anyone who has data in the business, recruit users to beta-test prototypes and propose articulate solutions for problems that need to be solved. They use quantitative data from analytics gathered in various ways, and qualitative from more personal consultation exercises with users. They will hesitate if you ask them to redesign a page and hand over wireframes tomorrow, coming back with something like “we need to validate with our users that this is the right solution”.
• Agile Facilitators — These people are somewhere between party hosts, coaches and forum moderators, but with a certain psychic ability to help a group articulate complex, brilliant ideas and use workshop structures more creative than “brainstorming” to create plans and align a team. This is a major component of UX, but on its own, facilitators can be coming from more of a Business background in project management, or even Sales! Sometimes they are relegated to the minutiae of managing tickets in Jira, Asana or others, but from my viewpoint, the magic happens in Miro.
• Product Designers — This job title comes a bit more from the history of manufacturing and industrial design for physical products. Of course, many methodologies in digital design come from the systematic approach of companies like Toyota, but instead of cars it’s websites, apps and other interfaces like wearables or mall directories. It can really be the same as a UX Designer in today’s world, using a lot of beta-testing prototypes, and going back to the drawing board to make further improvements.
• Interaction Designers — These people are generally designing “interactive” interfaces, but more specifically in the UX context, can be looking at transitions between images, parallax effects, loading animations, hover and selected states, as well as more advanced features involving gamification.
• Service Designers — This title can live on the same level of a company as a Product Manager, overseeing the work of developers, designers and a digital team overall. They make a business case and roadmaps for new digital projects, but they take a bigger step back and look at the fuller brand experience, including how a user arrives at a digital product from marketing and sales initiatives, or how the online process of signing up for a membership includes the design and manufacturing of the cards and their security features.
• Product Managers—These are the people making the business case for a redesign, and finding the budget for it, and putting together the right team of designers, developers, QA people etc. They roadmap what happens when, and commonly manage sprints and planning sessions, they connect people in the digital team to maintain alignment and help everyone speak the same language. Typically they have loose experience as a developer, with a strong sense of design and enough understanding of what it takes to build an idea. They are the ones to convince about the need to do user testing, and they can help pitch it to other business leaders. Product Managers can also be Product Owners, for a more specific digital project, for example a large retailer has their usual eCommerce website (product team 1), but now they’re building a phone app (product team 2), and also launching a private-label credit card program for financing purchases (product team 3).
• Human-Centred Design Practitioners — Not a common title anymore, this essentially became UX Design, but HCD was the foundation of principles that formed UX as a new field.
• Digital Producers — This job title involves a lot of repetitive work, uploading content to pages with similar layouts, or curating and editing stock imagery to meet the style guide better, exporting the proper resolutions etc. They can be responsible for smaller fine-tuning on webpages, like inserting special characters into fine print using keyboard shortcuts for glyphs, hooking up links, making content for social media, or rearranging existing content on a page according to research findings.
• Digital Strategists — Strategy is so wide, these individuals can come from a huge range of backgrounds, and they might have worked in a lot of different titles that gave them familiarity with how different parts of a business work together. They are often tasked with workshop facilitation, stakeholder interviews, frameworks, and data analysis. The level of involvement they have with implementation varies, but they can often be a project manager.
• Web Designers —Typically this role doesn’t involve a lot of design and creativity, and it requires basic coding. They will generally be handed a set of instructions what to change on a page, and implement it.
• UX Writer— The way that written content gets interpreted or misinterpreted can vastly impact the ability for users to get things done. It’s distinct from the usual copywriting and Comms team part of the business. This role looks a bit more specifically at things like the labels on form fields (for example “Family Name” can be very confusing for people from non-English countries), or the common vernacular needed for localisation when the company launches in a different country. They can also be responsible for testing the best wording for a CTA, “buy now” vs. “add to cart”, etc.
• UX Developer — This is a hybrid role that works essentially in between designers and developers. They can be the experts in a smooth handoff between design and dev, and can bounce things back sooner with feedback for the designer on what is needed to get the design through development.

Hopefully this is a helpful breakdown of the lingo that surrounds UX-related job titles and what they really mean. Maybe it can help you to hire the people you really need for a balanced team, or as a job-hunter, see some of the signs and signals of whether a posting is right for you, beyond what it says in the description.