UX vs. UI: What is the Difference, and Which one to choose in 2024?

Up until now, we, as a company, have been a part of many debates trunking from the design industry. While some are easily settled, others take time and effort from every side as we work together to build a common understanding.

Still, one of the long-standing debates is about the difference between UX and UI or User Experience and User Interface. Also, we need to understand if we can or should prioritize one of the other.

The User Interface (UI) comprises a set of screens, pages, and visual elements—such as buttons and icons—that allow a person to engage with a product or service at its most basic level.

The internal experience that a person experiences as they interact with every facet of a company’s products and services is known as user experience (UX).

It’s typical for people to mix up these terms or use them wrongly. User interface refers to the device’s physical elements, such as the screen, buttons, scrolling capabilities, and sound; the user experience is a broader word that encompasses everything a user encounters from start to finish.

In this guide, we will go into the details of UI and UX to understand their differences completely followed by analyzing the importance of each. We will end the discussion by finding out whether one should be prioritized over the other in 2022 or not.

Must Read: Top Web Design Trends to Lookout in 2022

What is User Interface (UI)?

User Interface includes typography, pictures, and other visual design components used to design and transform a simple interface into a digestible and usable screen. Adding these unique elements improves a product’s accessibility and approach while creating an emotional bond between the end-user and the product.

Can you imagine that the concept of user interface design was not prevalent before the 1980s? Yes, in the 70’s era, people wanting to operate a computer had to submit the requests with command line interface, something very few people know about today.

The first graphical user interface was built in the 80’s by scientists at Xerox PARC. With this innovation beginning then, we have covered a lot of ground until today. The principle has not changed in all these years.

We are still giving commands to the computer by clicking on buttons, icons, menus, etc., but the way these buttons and icons are presented has changed, which is what we do in UI graphic design services.

What is User Interface Design?

The process of turning wireframes into a polished graphical user interface is known as UI design. User interface design complements user experience, a collection of tasks aimed at optimizing a product for an immersive usage experience. It includes the look and feel, presentation, and interactivity of a product.

A user interface is the point of interaction between a user and a digital device or product, such as the touchscreen on your smartphone or the touchpad on the coffee machine, or even the ATM.

A UI design considers the product’s look, feel, and interactivity. In terms of website and applications, It’s all about making a product’s user interface as intuitive as possible, which includes carefully examining every visual, interactive element the user can come across.

A user interface designer works hard so that the end-user won’t have to work to interact with the screen. The best design is the design that works and is transparent. In other words, it must be so smooth that it should feel natural.

What is User Experience?

User experience is the evolution of user interface or we can say that it is the next stage in the process of designing. Users’ experiences, whether favorable, bad, or neutral, affected how they felt about those encounters with the screen, and in turn, with the device or solution.

The whole experience people have when interacting with a product is referred to as user experience (UX). User-experience-focused products are used to deliver a nice experience.

In this meaning, user experience refers to a user’s emotional reaction to a product. It refers to a user’s complete experience with a brand from beginning to end, not just the actual use of a system. To create a pleasant user experience, you must first understand your user’s needs, goals, and challenges.

What is User Experience Design?

As we aim to understand the UI and UX difference, it is always better to know the core concepts of each category. To this extent, user experience design is the human-first method of creating a design for any product. Be it an online solution, website, application, physical product, etc., user experience designing is pivotal to ensure conversion and customer retention.

A user experience (UX) designer considers how the interaction with the interface makes the person feel and how simple it is for them to do their desired tasks. They also do task analyses and observe users to see how they finish activities in a user flow.The ultimate goal of UX design is to provide users with simple, efficient, relevant, and overall enjoyable experiences.

What’s the Difference Between UX and UI?

In one line, UX is the foundation of the house, and UI is the paint and furniture you put into it. While this is a raw distinction, it helps understand UI and UX differences. Explaining this analogy further;

The foundation of the house will come first or the UX of the solution you will be building is ahead of the UI part. Creating a sketch for how each room links and interacts with the others, selecting functional door placements, determining the most practical location for the stairs, or idealizing the doorway, the front porch, how the front and back of the house connects.

Similarly, in an app’s UX designing, UX designers ideate the interlinking between the screens, where and how the buttons will be placed, or what sort of transition is required to connect two screens, etc.

The UI UX design difference arises from the fact that the UX lets you build a robust application structure and once that structure is finalized we can focus on the interior design. In a house, this involved hanging attractive images, selecting furniture that complements the wallpaper color, and organizing kitchen utensils, so they’re easy to reach without being cluttered.

In terms of an application, a creative graphic design professional will finalize the colors, font, typography, images, videos, gradients, and so much more.

There aren’t many points that we can use to describe the difference between UX and UI, mostly because a lot of things in both fields are interconnected. This is because both the processes are built with the end-user in mind.

In conducting user research, a user experience designer may discover insights that a UI designer can then use to develop an interface. On the other hand, UX is a considerably larger term that refers to a product’s or system’s entire user experience.

Let’s take Amazon Prime for example. The one or two-day delivery benefit is added to improve the user experience, which means that user experience can go beyond the scope of a digital screen. But the part where a customer wants to check the eligibility of one-day delivery is taken care of by the UI designers. They can design a button that will help the users know the eligibility of the product.

Now should you be worried about the difference between UX and UI to the extent that you need to decide which one to follow in 2022? Absolutely not!

UX and UI are both integral to creating a product that is welcomed by the audience and used by them as well. Plus, both UX and UI is an evolving concept, so whatever you are implementing may be pivotal today. But it can happen that any of the concepts you use today won’t matter three years down the line because the meaning and implementation of these concepts evolves.

What do UX and UI Designers do?

To further know the difference between UX and UI, we can quickly go through the differences in the work of a UX and UI designer.

Conclusion

As we have established that both UI and UX are a part of the bigger designing process, and they are interrelated to a great extent. When it comes to knowing the difference between UX and UI, we need to look at the process and methods associated with each of these domains.

From research to implementation and creation, there are some differences between them but there too, we have been able to pinpoint some common links. In essence, a UI/UX design company always needs to have both UX and UI designers so that they can build a complete and collaborative design.

Talking about a UI/UX design company, our designers at MobMaxime have years of experience in designing user interfaces with an aim to improve the user experience. Let us know if and when you want to build immersive user experiences via smooth, transparent, and customer-friendly designs.