A website is a tool for selling and promoting products or services with respect to business use. In many cases, one person is developing the website from start to finish. That is the way it has always been and always will be. So what is UX/UI designer? Is it two different professionals building the same website?
- UX Means – User Experience
- UI Means – User Interface
You cannot have one without the other. But somehow modern web design firms and job recruiters have done just that. You can now have a job as a UI designer without being a UX designer. While in actuality the two are inseparable. There would be no user experience without a user interface. In the real world, a user interface in the past was most commonly hardware. A keyboard was a user interface. A touch screen is a user interface.
Therefore UX meaning user experience is referring to how the person using that keyboard or touch screen feels about it. Is it easy to use? Does it do everything required of it? So far example a UX designer would look for ways to make that keyboard easier to use. The UI designer would create the keyboard based on input from the UX designer. They actually did that with the ergonomically designed keyboards. As I said, you cannot have one without the other.
This was a very basic interpretation of what is UX/UI designer. It gets much more complex when you start referring to large corporations designing products/services and marketing channels to get the products sold past the competition. Now a UI user interface becomes the website itself. How can a customer perceive the product online? Will the design layout, color scheme, interactivity all work together to entice the customer to buy the product or service? It does not stop there. UX design includes how the customer uses, likes and whether the product or service fulfilled its design expectations.
The UX user experience designer is really much more a researcher than a designer. The UX designer has to interact with the users that are accessing the user interface. They need to understand what the customer reacts to and how. There are many tools in the toolbox of the UX designer.
- Social media
- Surveys
- Product testing
- Online monitoring
- Sales reports
The job of the UX designer is probably the most difficult. The UX designer needs to run tests on how people are responding to the website. The job of the UX designer can be seen as going all the way back to how the product is packaged, into marketing, and eventually how it is accepted by the customer. The information learned from UX is used in the website UI design to improve the overall performance of the website.
Basically, if you started doing web design 20 years ago to find customers online as I did then you have earned a lot of titles and no degrees needed. I was learning in the school of hard knocks all of this. I would develop various designs and run them on separate web pages to see how the visitors reacted long before I heard the term A/B testing or UX/UI design. If I found that doing this brought in and captivated more users “UX Design” then I focused on that aspect and improved the website “UI Design”. So what is UX/UI designer, I am one.