UX & UI Designers. Same but diffrent?

In this article, I’ll describe the differences between UX (user experience) and UI (user interface) designers by answering the most popular questions that come up about those professions. 

How not to get confused about what scope of work is assigned to each of the UX areas? What is the difference between a UX designer and a UI designer? Which of them should you choose? Hopefully, answering those questions will help you decide which of the two fits your skills best. 

I will try to summarize the main points of the UX/UI discussion in the simplest way, according to both my own experience and the experts I respect.

Basically,  UX is how the car rides and UI is how it looks.

Differences between UX and UI design

Definition

UX designer (User experience designer)

UI designer (User interface designer)

Responsible for designing how users behave using a product, understanding the users, ensuring the features work, and improving the users’ overall experience.

Responsible for expanding on the UX designer’s work by creating its visual representation, adjusting the look of the website to a brand’s style, and focusing attention on interaction with contrast spacing and placement of components.

Roles

UX designer

Designer

Strategist

Marketer

Analytical investigator

QA Tester

UI designer

Aesthete

Designer

Digital artist

Motion graphic designer

Interaction designer 

Front end programmer

Further specializations (obligatory roles)

UX designer

UX/UI Designer (generalist)

UX Researcher

UX Architect

Interaction designer

UX/UI Developer

UX Writer

Usability Analyst

UI designer

UX/UI Designer (generalist)

Web & UI designer

Motion graphic and animation designer

Illustration and graphic designer

Typography and publication designer

Advertising designer

Responsibilities and processes

UX designer

Researching 

• Conducting user interviews to identify their requirements
• Create personas of a typical user to identify their goals

• Competition and market data
• Journey maps - how people use this product

Brainstorming and designing

• Analyzing and creating information architecture
• Communicating design ideas to developers

• Developing user flows - diagrams of experiencing a product step by step
• Developing wireframes - a rough skeleton representing UI and components

Reporting

• Analyze usability problems by observing real users using the product
• Split testing the effectiveness between design iterations
• Analytics reporting with additional insights such as time spent on pages, click-through rate, etc.

UI designer

Prototyping

• Analyzing brand style
• Designing and researching mood boards
• Designing prototypes - Fulfills UX wireframes with graphic content, low and high-quality interactive prototypes

Implementation

• Creating a UI kit with a visual hierarchy
• Communicating with front-end and back-end developers
• Solving visual problems on websites
• Optimizing and preparing graphics to match development and performance requirements
• Iterating to improve users’ visual attention on the website

Overall way of work

UX designer

Big picture of the problem

Works with people

Focuses on listening, data, and analysis

UI designer

Polishing and finalizing touches

Works mostly on their own

Focuses on visual representations and details

So, why so much confusion?

Surely, you’ve come across the term UX & UI designer in many job offers. This term usually refers to UX, UI generalist that combines both UI and UX skills. This term brings a lot of confusion because, on the one hand, UX & UI are separate fields, on the other, they overlap to some extent. To make matters worse, UX designers often come from UI designers and vice versa, which does not make it any easier to distinguish one from the other.

The best UI design with a bad UX design is still a bad design.

Which career path is better?

Most freelancers' work is a one-man show that combines both UX and UI designers’ roles. On top of that, market demand is not set in any direction. Due to the slowdown of the global market, companies are increasingly looking for individuals with a broader skill set, eliminating the risk associated with the employment budget. However, hiring generalists involves a greater risk of them making mistakes than in the case of individual specialists. Thus, the choice of development should be motivated by your personal skills, because, ultimately, they are the deciding factor in whether a particular company will be interested in your employment.