What is UX Design and UI Design? What are the differences?

In this blog, you will gain a comprehensive overview of the UX and UI design fields by learning the differences between UX and UI design, the duties and skills of each, the steps and job opportunities to become a UX/UI designer.

As the number of screens we interact with increases day by day, how we carry out this interaction becomes increasingly important. The first thing most of us do when we wake up in the morning is look at our phones. From that moment on, we experience carefully prepared interfaces for users and perform many operations, from browsing social media to shopping. Moreover, this situation is not limited only to our phones. Computer screens, televisions and even the screens of electrical kitchen appliances are also included in this process.

The terms UX/UI are today's inseparable duo when it comes to the interface design of digital displays. Let's take a closer look at the terms UX Design and UI Design, which are quite different from each other but complement each other.

What is UX Design?

UX design is about designing the experience that the user will have from the moment they interact with the product. As user interface design has recently gained importance on computers and later on mobile devices, more work has been devoted to the functionality of these interfaces and the experience they offer to the user. With the development in technology, terminal interfaces are rapidly evolving into applications in our pockets, while the user interfaces are pleasing to the eye, as well as the usefulness of these interfaces is the factor that determines the quality of the design.

What are the Duties of a UX Designer?

If you decide to become a UX designer and shape your career in this direction, your main concern is to ensure that the user's experience in the application you design is as close to perfect as possible. Beyond visuals, the UX designer deals with non-digital, cognitive science.

It is the responsibility of the UX designer to ensure that the designed product and interface are simple, understandable, functional and intuitive. The UX designer is responsible for considering all the steps of the user, with all their possibilities, from the moment the application is opened, and designing the most successful flow. If we consider an e-commerce site, the most important factor for the user to find the e-commerce site successful is that he can easily find the product he is looking for among perhaps hundreds of products, easily complete the payment process and easily follow the delivery process. It is the duty of the UX designer to design this shopping experience that the user experiences. We can collect the duties of the UX designer under several subheadings.

*Creating a Strategy: The first thing needed when designing user experience is a strategy. Answers are sought to questions such as who will use the product, for what purpose, and how competitors carry out similar processes. Customer analysis and user research, content planning, competitor analysis and preparing a product strategy are among the duties of the UX designer.

*Testing and Prototyping: Once our strategy is ready, it is time to create a prototype of the processes and test it. UX designer prepares wireframes, creates prototypes and performs testing.

*Business Execution: Ensures coordination by working with UX designers, UI designers and software developers. They make design plans and follow the process while the product is created by tracking the target. They try to optimize the user experience with UX analysis.

What Qualities Should a UX Designer Have?

If you want to start your career as a UX designer, there are certain characteristics that a UX designer must have. The UX designer must have the ability to conduct research, solve problems, and communicate effectively. In addition, they must know design and master prototyping and testing processes.

As a UX designer, doing research will be one of your biggest tasks when designing user experience. Evaluation of data obtained from people's behavior, competitor analysis and testing of prototypes is at the core of user experience design.

It is the UX designer's responsibility to foresee the problems that the user encounters or may encounter while using the product and to solve these problems in the most rational way.

Having good communication skills is the key to ensuring that the user experience prepared by establishing correct communication with other teams during the product design process is included in the product exactly as you designed it and that the user has a successful experience.

While doing all this, having design and basic software knowledge and knowing the technical limits of UI designers and software developers in user experience design will enable you to carry out the user experience design process within these limits.

How Does the UX Design Process Progress?

The UX design process is a working process with certain basic stages. The process generally works as follows:

*Research: UX design starts with user research. Through research on existing or target user groups, the problems experienced by the user are identified and what solution the users expect to these problems is determined. In this research process, data obtained using methods such as user surveys, A/B tests, first click test, eye tracking test are used.

*Design: Now that you know the problems the user is experiencing and the solution they expect, you should come up with your own solutions to these problems. You should start by choosing the most logical and feasible solution among the solutions you find. While answering questions such as where and how the solution you have created will be used, you should create user flow diagrams, that is, tables showing the path the user will follow in the application, and as the last step, move on to the process of creating wireframes.

*Prototyping: A realistic prototype that can be interacted with is created for test users to test our application and the solution we offer.

*Validation: User experience tests are carried out with real or test groups to demonstrate the accuracy of the designs. If it is proven that the application provides an effective user experience, the process is completed. Otherwise, changes are made to the design by going back to the previous stages or using different methods designs are worked on.

What is UI Design?

When you enter a website, use an application, or even look at any digital screen, all the visuals you see are part of the interface. UI (User Interface) has entered our language as an interface. Unlike the cognitive aspect of UX design, UI design has a concrete, graphical feature. All the buttons, logos, fonts and menus you currently see on this site are part of the interface. It is also the duty of the UI designer to prepare these interfaces.

What are the Duties of a UI Designer?

UI design is about the visual aspect of the product. It aims to provide the user with an aesthetically beautiful and easily understandable visual interface that reflects the brand, distinguishes the product from others. UI design carries out the selection of colors and fonts, the design of interface elements and their placement on the screen.

Creating experiences for users seems tempting, but if you want to do a more concrete, more visual job and think you have a talent for design, becoming a UI designer may be more suitable for you. No matter how important user experience is, how this experience is presented to the user is equally important. This is where UI designers come into play. The main duties of the UI designer are:

*Creating a brand style: While preparing the interface, the UI designer also decides on many choices that will be identified with the brand in the user's mind, from the colors used in the application to the fonts of the texts.

*Preparing the visual design: It is the UI designer's duty to design each visual element that will be reflected on the user's screen and arrange their layout.

*Creating adaptable designs: As the number of digital screens we use increases, the sizes of these screens have also become quite diverse. In this sense, the UI designer should prepare responsive designs that will continue to work properly on different screen sizes. If visual effects and animations will be included as part of the interface in the application, the UI designer should create them.

*Creating interactive designs: If visual effects and animations will be included as part of the interface on the application, the UI designer should create them.

What Features Should a UI Designer Have?

Creativity is undoubtedly at the top of the list of skills that a UI designer should have. The interface to be created will be entirely a product of the creative thought of the designer. In addition, the designer's creative thinking is effective in displaying complex processes in the simplest and most effective way. The ability to communicate effectively, which almost everyone should have in business life, is also important. It is extremely important to communicate correctly with both the designers you work with and other teams working on the product. On the other hand, the designer also communicates with the user through the design he creates.

How Does the UI Design Process Progress?

Although there are minor changes in UI design processes, the design process goes through similar stages in all of them:

*Research: As in UX design, UI design starts with research. Goals are determined by revealing the design requirements in line with user research, competitor analysis and directives from the UX team.

*Wireframe preparation: Wireframes allow to outline the interface. Before moving on to the visual design process, you will have a plan for the placement of interface units. In addition, it is very valuable to prepare a wireframe so that you can evaluate the situation with other teams (UX designers, software developers) who have a say in the project before starting the visual design process.

*Visual design: The visual design process begins with determining the basic elements of the design, such as color scheme and font selection for the interface to be designed. Wireframes, which are rough drawings, are transformed into sophisticated and personalized interfaces.

*Prototyping and testing: After the visual design, the resulting designs are turned into prototypes with simple functions that are suitable for user flow. In this way, joint work can be carried out with other teams in the project and flaws in the design can be identified and corrected. When the prototypes reach the desired level, the testing process can be carried out with real users.

*Delivery phase: When the design process is completed, before the resulting design is delivered to the developer team, a style guide containing information about the colors, fonts and similar information used, and documents explaining many details to the developer team, from the effects used in the design to the behavior of the units, are prepared.

What are the Differences Between UX and UI Design?

UX and UI design are terms that are often confused with each other and used interchangeably. However, both are fields that require very different expertise. There are several points that distinguish UX and UI design.

*UX design is about how the design feels. It is concerned with how the user's experience is. UI design is about how the design looks. The visuals that the user sees on the screen are the domain of UI design.

*UX design analyzes user behavior. As a result of these analyses, it creates a prototype and tests it. UI design, on the other hand, creates the interface that the user interacts with by revealing the visual style of the brand in accordance with UX design.

*UI design is a completely digital process. UX design, on the other hand, has a field of work beyond digital as human behavior is involved.

To summarize, while UX design determines the path the user will follow in the application, UI design creates units that allow the user to experience the experience.

What is UX/UI Designer?

From the beginning of the article, I mentioned UX design and UI design as two separate fields. The biggest reason why these two separate fields are so confused is the UX/UI position that we frequently encounter today. The UX/UI position emerged because both fields complement each other and have requirements that can be met by the same person. Companies prefer that processes be faster and that the minds that design the user experience also design the interface with the same mentality...