What is UX/UI design and what does it stand for?
“I want to be a chef who can also cook”, said no-one ever.
So it is with “UX/UI”, a mashed-together, fashionable, and thoroughly confuddled job title that makes as much sense as “triathlete/swimmer” or “doctor/surgeon”. The reasons they’re munged together like that is nobody can get it straight what these things even are, and you can see the confusion to the many answers on the very question above.
“UX is emotional and stuff and UI is what things look like and UX is functionality and UI is pleasing visuals and UX is wireframes and prototypes and UI is Web design and UX is how it works and UI is how it looks and HTML and CSS and …”
No.
Stop it.
This might go long, so strap in.
Companies are already completely confused what to hire for and what to call the roles, and yet here we are, people who work in the design field for a living and ought to know better, making it worse.
And, on cue, out come the infographics. Simple, clear, and wrong.
(Adapted from The Difference Between UX and UI Design — A Layman’s Guide. Everything in red is mine. Sorry, not sorry.)
(There, I fixed it. From UX Design: The New Frontier. Sorry, not sorry. And can we please kill dead this “left brain vs. right brain” nonsense? Design is problem solving. Problem solving requires all parts of your brain. OK?)
(The original is not an example of “design” vs. UX. User-experience design is design. The original is an example of a design that didn’t anticipate actual human use but was laid out according to geometry and formalism instead.)
(Oh, the old ketchup-bottle analogy. Sorry, it’s crap. The user experience is getting some fucking ketchup on my hot dog. The user interface is the means to get it onto my food. The old glass bottle had a usability problem, not a product problem — the ketchup was fine. The usability problem was that you’d wait five minutes for the ketchup to descend after vigorous shaking, and then your food would be covered in a tsunami of ketchup. The new bottle is at least squeezable, but it didn’t solve the real problem — now, instead of shaking, you squeeze, and squeeze, and squeeze, nothing nothing nothing … until a firehose of ketchup shoots out to drown your food.)
OK. End rant. So what are UX and UI? Well, these things have definitions, for Pete’s sake. Let’s go:
The user experience (UX) is the sum total of everything that affects your perception as a user. The UX is an outcome. If you’re doing actual UX design, you’re trying to juggle and all kinds of variables including, but not limited to, the aesthetics and usability of the user interface.
The UX role has a clear origin and a specific definition that went with it. This goes back to Apple — yes, that Apple — in the nineties and one of the founding and most influential practitioners in the fields of usability, human factors, human-computer interface, and experience, whatever you want to call it, Don Norman.
“User experience” encompasses all aspects of the end-user’s interaction with the company, its services, and its products.
- The Definition of User Experience (UX)
Why?
I invented the term because I thought human interface and usability were too narrow. I wanted to cover all aspects of the person’s experience with the system including industrial design graphics, the interface, the physical interaction and the manual. Since then the term has spread widely, so much so that it is starting to lose its meaning.
- Where Did the Term “User Experience” Come From?
This is not a matter of his opinion versus someone else’s. He’s the one who created the role and defined it in the first place, and he coined it deliberately to solve a problem, so let’s stop pretending we can just make “UX” fit whatever shaped hole we want to cram it into. “UX encompasses all aspects …” because all aspects affect the user’s experience. It cannot be otherwise.
If you claim to be a UX designer, your scope is to wrangle a whole bunch of stuff into shape somehow, including but not limited to usability, aesthetics, copy, and utility. You need to be involved at every level, starting with ideation and feature/function decisions, because they affect the experience. You need to understand the effects of information architecture and interaction design as well as tone and clarity of copy. This is an umbrella discipline.
The user interface, on the other hand, is a thing, not an outcome. It’s the set of controls and information you see, read, hear, and use.
Let’s reset some preconceived notions here. I made a little collage of things that are user interfaces, though you may not think of them as such:
User interface does not mean the visual design of software, whether it’s an app or a Web application or a desktop program. User interfaces include everything we interact with to make tools do something.
When you drive your car, you have a pedals, dials, knobs, levers, buttons, and handles arranged for you so you can, you know, drive. That’s your user interface to the car. When you turn on the TV, you have a remote, which is your UI to the TV. When you ask Alexa or Siri or Google for directions to the nearest boutique that carries yak hair, you’re using a voice UI — you interact with the tool by talking with it.
There is nothing inherent to UI that says visual design is the critical factor. Many user interfaces have no visual presentation at all. No, the critical factor, and the most important measure of quality, is usability. Therefore, as a UI designer, the foundational skill set is usability, not graphic design. Visual design becomes important if the UI is visual, but comes after usability considerations and needs to support function.
So, to say that UI design is “visual” or “graphic” design, or that a UI designer “creates mock-ups” shows a complete misunderstanding of what a user interface even is.
To do UI design you must consider user and task analysis, information architecture, interaction design, and copy as well as any visual presentation. These are all, not coincidentally, considerations of the UX designer, but if you’re a UI specialist you just have more focus and in-depth expertise in that particular area.
So. UI is part of UX because UI affects the overall experience. If you’re doing UX design, that includes UI. If you’re doing UI design specifically, on the other hand, that is a narrower focus than UX. It makes no sense to put them together as if they were two halves of a whole — it’s like saying “fruits/apples” or “meats/beef”.
Just to belabor the point and maybe succeed in driving it home, let’s return for a minute to my example of the car UI above. Think about the experience of owning a car. Included in that is the experience of driving it, but also buying it, cost of ownership, any annoyances you have with it, anything you like. It includes the visual design of the body itself, the materials used, the fit and finish, the colors, the performance; a thousand details. That all adds up to an experience. Included in that experience is the UI, meaning the controls, dashboard, pedals, door handles — anything you use to operate the thing. Neither is more important than the other. UI design is just more specific and focused.
Now please go forth and use these labels properly. Don Norman, who supplied us with the original definition of UX, has also done so much to define and discover many of the concepts, heuristics, and practices we take for granted today. The least we can do is show enough respect not to fuck up the UX label any more than it already has been.
But don’t take my word for it. Here’s the man himself telling you:
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If that wasn’t enough ranting for you, here’s some more:
Per Jorgensen’s answer to Which is better, UI or UX design?
Per Jorgensen’s answer to Is a UX/UI designer’s job to create mockups for developers to copy?
Originally published at http://quora.com.
