The problem with UX & UI distinctions

Published in

IDx Transformación Digital

6 min readMay 30, 2017

The term ‘UX Design’ is becoming increasingly harder to define. I stumbled upon this conclusion during the first days of 2017 in the middle of a stretched discussion I decided to have with my father. Dad is turning 66 years old this summer and he’s not a big fan of terms he doesn’t understand at first glance. To his unpleasant surprise, my answer to his “so what is it you do for a living?” question didn’t live up to his expectations after I answered with two conjoined letters and the word ‘design’ standing after them. The aftermath of my response went a little like this:

U Flex What?
… (chuckles) User Experience Designer, dad. I basically build & supervise the customer’s experience throughout the digital products our clients hire us to produce.
… (blank face)
Alright, remember I told you I do some research with people in order to help make computer programs?
Yes
Alright, well all that research helps me design the screens of a system in which people feel comfortable.
But that’s just a regular designer. Why do you need to complicate the term with letters nobody understands?
Yes, in a sense. But I only produce the initial ‘canvas’, which will then be painted over promptly by other designers with my supervision. That’s why we need the distinction.
Ok… but why do you talk about ‘experience’? How can you design an experience? That makes no sense.
Ah! Great question! Experience is the trajectory through which our users will pass during their digital interactions. I make sure each step they take is clear, visually appealing, and fun.
(blank face again) You’re still only designing screens. The user’s experience is a very subjective thing for you to intend to change it just by using colors.
(Notably irritated by his response) (…) Let’s just leave it at that. How was golf yesterday? (…)

Here’s the problem.

Beyond the over-simplification of his argument, my father does have a point. We really do like to use vague words to describe very specific things in our industry. After analyzing my clear irritation due to his response, I realized my frustration can be traced to the fact that I didn’t really have a good answer for him. In order to establish the distinction between our design roles, we rely on one person to focus on the overall ‘Experience’ (UX) and another person to focus on the final ‘Interface’ (UI). The problem with this logic is that the two roles are actually more inverted when you put a little more thought into them.

The user interface; the screen that will eventually be brought close to a user’s face; is usually impacted a lot more by the traditional UX role than by any UI. What we’re really trying to do as experience designers is to produce the blueprints through which a design will come to life, but those blueprints actually have a lot of final design of their own. We do interfere with the interface, and we continue to do so after the UI does her work, but we don’t seem to get much credit for it, according to our name.

On the other hand, UI designers achieve a lot more when trying to impact the user experience (the use of his or her senses and motivations), by manipulating color, interactions, and animations. Not only this, but they are responsible for the final perception that any user actually receives through their artistic means.

Putting things in context.

In a brief attempt to provide some clarity amidst all this confusion, I will try and expand upon what our industry has defined for us:

User Experience Design: A design process that accounts for: User needs, functional specifications, content requirements, information architecture, interaction design, information design, interface design, and visual design.

Don Norman, the person who COINED the term UX has this to say:

“True user experience goes far beyond giving customers what they say they want, or providing checklist features. In order to achieve high-quality user experience in a company’s offerings there must be a seamless merging of the services of multiple disciplines, including engineering, marketing, graphical and industrial design, and interface design.”

This basically means that designing any digital user experience entails everything from: registering the user’s point of view (their problems, needs, motivations), supervising the last pixel of the designed visual system, up to designing how the users will come in contact with the implied digital product.

Quite the task, if you ask me.

I could make a very good bet that if you ask 20 different self-proclaimed UX designers what they do, you’d get at least 12 different answers. As of now, there are 6 defined roles within the broad “UX Design” parameters. Here I provide a brief summary of what they do and their top 3 tools of the trade:

All of these roles are invariably necessary when constructing a new product or redesigning an existing one. The difference between these design processes is how much time we consume throughout all of the different stages and how involved each person is during the product’s definition.

What it all really means. (tl;dr)

There’s no wonder as to why we get all sorts of mixed pieces of information when selling, developing and acquiring digital design services. UX Design is too much of a broad term to expect quick benefits from it (or just one person in charge of it). I predict with a 95% level of confidence that the term UX Designer will vanish into our forgotten lexicon within the next 3 years, only to be replaced with 3 to 5 distinct roles that stand throughout the whole product creation & iteration process.

There’s a real need to establish better roles for what we do as product designers within our organizations. UX is a vision for producing better interactions, and not an outcome of design. Therefore, we really need to start treating it that way, before broad terms become the norm for a stereotype that makes people’s jobs a lot harder.

The nagging question after this overarching analysis then becomes: How do you organize the workflow of 5 different design roles to create agile products that produce tangible value? This will be one of the topics that we’ll be covering throughout our next design entries, so follow us on Medium, subscribe to our newsletter, and stay tuned for more design stories from us.