UX designer ? UI designer ? UI Developer ? WTH !!
I kept hearing these terms ever since I started my career. Often, seeing these on job listing pages and websites, I used to be all confused how is one different than other. So this might be useful for someone in the same boat as I was then.
**Disclaimer : every company has different structure. A big company might have extra layers of graphic designers, interaction designers, UX researchers(sky is the limit). On the other hand, smaller startups might combine UI designer and developer into one role, product owner might be the UX designer and many other combinations.
The UX designer is someone who thinks about what should the user flow be like, which page should lead to which page, when should a confirm popup appear or not appear, should there be a listing page before or after a create-new page, should there be an address field in the page or geolocation is enough to serve the purpose? After brainstorming through each of these and several other questions, the UX designer comes up with something known as wireframes, which in simple terms is just a blueprint of the website/app .
The UI designer then takes the wireframes and makes them beautiful, also ensuring that the workflow of the product is communicated well to the user. He will add the pixel level details to the wireframes. What should be the font used, what should be the background image, do we need a background image, what should be the foreground color, how big should be the submit button, does it make more sense to have the menu at the bottom of the screen, what should the logo look like? The job of a UI designer is answering all these and thereafter delivering static mockups, using may be Photoshop, Invision and many other design tools.
The UI developer is the one who puts these static mockups in “real code”. They might need skills like HTML CSS , precompilers(like sass or less) , UI frameworks (like bootstrap or foundation), or xml layouts( in case of android UI) or a combined knowledge of all of them with Javascript (in case of react, react native). The result is a beautiful set of screens/pages which can be actually rendered in a browser or a mobile device.
