So, exactly what do you do?

Here’s a Friends trivia question for you: What is Chandler Bing’s Job?

For those of you who have binge-watched Friends as much as I have, you’ll be familiar with this long-running joke — that for the first 9 seasons of the show (before Chandler quits his job), no one really knows what Chandler does for a living. It has something to with numbers, “transponding,” and the WENUS (Weekly Estimated Net Usage System, obviously).

As a UI and UX designer, I often feel like the Chandler Bing among my group of friends.

“So, you’re like a graphic designer right?”
“Do you just make web pages pretty?”
“Do you program everything also?”

These are some of the questions my friends and strangers have asked me upon hearing what I do. While my job title is not nearly as obscure as Chandler’s, it certainly isn’t as easily recognizable as those such as “Doctor” or “Chef.” And like Chandler, I have a hard time summarizing what my day-to-day responsibilities entail and often resort to using obscure words acronyms.

So, spurred by my inability to explain myself to others and by the general confusion I’ve observed around me, I’m here to set the record straight and explain exactly what UI & UX design means. Bear with me and please, correct me if I’m wrong.

A brief overview of design-related roles

To understand UI and UX design, it is important to understand the design-related roles commonly found in the tech industry.

Using my existing knowledge, and borrowing from a few online sources (here and here), I’ve attempted to create a visual representation. From left to right, the circles illustrate the various disciplines that work together to create a website from research to production, respectively:

“A UI without UX is like a painter slapping paint onto canvas without thought; while UX without UI is like the frame of a sculpture with no paper maché on it. A great product experience starts with UX followed by UI. Both are essential for the product’s success.” — Rahul Varshney, Co-creator of Foster.fm

User Experience Designer (UXD, UED)

Contrary to what the word “design” traditionally implies, UX designers are not concerned with making things aesthetically pleasing, but rather with making things easy-to-use for the people they are intended to be used by.

A UX designer’s role at a tech company typically involves finding solutions to a user problem using various research and low-fidelity (limited-functionality, not pretty) prototyping methods. These methods may include conducting user interviews, developing personas, administering surveys, analyzing data, affinity diagramming, wireframing, interactive prototyping, etc. While UX processes may differ from person-to-person and project-to-project, they are all centered around the goal of solving a problem to provide the best experience for that user.

• 1-Liner: A UX Designer uses various research and low-fidelity design techniques to ensure that an interface’s usability, accessibility, and experience is optimized for the user it is intended for.
• Deliverables: User Personas, User Scenarios, Journey Maps, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), Usability Reports, Storyboards, Interactive Prototypes,
• Technologies: R, Balsamiq, Axure, InVision, Omnigraffle

User Interface Designer (UI)

The role of a UI designer heavily overlaps with that of a UX designer — hence the job title “UI & UX Designer.” A UI designer is in charge of using insights gained from user experience research to design an interface that is optimized for the end-user.

Unlike a graphic designer’s role, a UI designer’s role is heavily structured and research-based, and unlike a UX designer’s role, a UI designer role focuses primarily on the aesthetics of an interface. UI designers are concerned with ensuring that the layout of an interface visually communicates what the user needs and wants. They do so by designing pixel-perfect mockups, creating site-wide style guides, establishing visual hierarchy, etc. As the bridge between research and development, a UI designer will often be required to work closely with developers to communicate UI specifications and interactions.

• 1-Liner: A UI Designer creates visual interfaces and elements whose look, feel, responsiveness, and interactivity optimizes the experience of the end-user.
• Deliverables: Pixel-Perfect Mockups, Mood Boards, Style Guides, UI Specifications, Sitemaps
• Technologies: Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Sketch

Front-End Developer

While there exists a “Design Unicorn” who has a skill set that ranges from UX research to back-end development, typically a designer’s role will end at front-end development. Often times, a UI designer will use front-end skills such as HTML, CSS, and Javascript to create static pages that bring to life the mockups they had designed.

The front-end (client-side) refers to the visual web elements that the user sees and interacts with, while the back-end (server-side) refers to the non-visible part of the web that connects with a database to return results to the user in the front-end. As front-end development involves a combination of design and development, it is typically included in roles such as “Web Designer,” “UI Designer,” and “UI Developer.”

• 1-Liner: A Front-End Developer uses HTML, CSS, and Javascript to create websites or web applications for direct user interaction.
• Deliverables: Static Websites, Web Applications, Modules
• Technologes: HTML, CSS, Javascript, JQuery

What about everything else?

So, what about all the other roles you may have seen floating around and in-between? Interaction Designer? Visual Designer? Graphic Designer? Art Director? Product Designer?

While many of these roles describe important disciplines with decades of history, others are simply combinations of design buzzwords. Nowadays, it seems as though the roles within the tech industry are incredibly organic. Designers are often required to wear multiple hats and exercise skills outside of their typical job description.

“I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what you want…but what I do have are a very particular set of skills, skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you.” — Liam Neeson as Bryan Mills, Taken

With the introduction of new technologies comes the introduction of new roles, titles, and skills with expectations and day-to-day responsibilities varying from company to company. However, having an understanding of the general disciplines of tech and design process will at least give you a better idea of how to decipher what those pesky acronyms and strange strings of design words really mean.

So now you know: UI & UX design is not just some obscure too-cool-for-school underground club that hipsters go to to sip on IPAs. It is a combination of two very intertwined design disciplines that together, create a beautiful interface and user experience.

Additional Resources

• The Difference Between UX and UI Design — a Layman’s Guide, Emil Lamprecht
• UI, UX: Who Does What? A Designer’s Guide to the Tech Industry, Lo Min Ming
• UX Design Defined, UX Design
• I Don’t Speak Your Language: Front-End vs Back-End, Treehouse