UI vs UX vs Web Designer
What’s the difference between UX and UI design? Are they the same thing as web design? What does a web designer do? These are all important questions to know if you want to enter the world of UX and design. UI, UX and web design have different skill sets, success metrics, and day-to-day roles, but they do overlap, which can make it confusing to tell them apart.
What is UX design?
In the design process, user experience, or UX design, comes first. UX designers create the architecture of a website. Their job is to make sure it’s easy for the user to get to what they’re looking for without any confusion by doing the groundwork for UI designers to build off of. Product research and creating user personas are big parts of a UX designer’s every day tasks. They create wireframes and prototypes that go through testing to fully understand their customers. UX designers are typically analytical people who are empathetic and have excellent problem solving skills.
What is UI design?
The user interface, or UI, designer works off of the groundwork completed by the UX designer. They design the layout of the page and the elements that the user interacts with while visiting the site or app. A UI designer decides how information should be arranged based off of research done on visual patterns and hierarchies. They take care of the more traditional topics that most people associate with design like colors choice and font. Designing buttons, icons, and other interactive parts of a page is also part of their day-to-day. Most companies have style guides created by UI designers that they can use as a reference to make sure every page follows a consistent style and color theme. UI designers ensure that everything they work on fits into the company’s brand image.
What is web design?
Web design encapsulates both UX and UI design. It’s an umbrella term for anything that relates to the aesthetic elements of a site, as well as the layout of information on a page and how well each page flows into each other. Terms like UX and UI have become more popular in recent years because of how vague “web design” is. In larger companies, there likely isn’t just one person designing a website. It’s more effective to have analytical designers who understand customer needs handle UX and artistic people who you would typically think of when you hear “design” handle UI.
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