What's the difference between UX and UI?

UI and UX are both popular terms in IT industry, however, just looking at current job offers is clear that the understanding of these terms isn't as extended.

As you will see, the skills sets for UX and UI designers differ significantly and you should consider this as a designer, developer, manager or recruiter.

To solve this confusion once for all here is described a very brief and simple explanation of the essential difference between UI and UX.

Let's start with the basics. UI is for User Interface. UX, for User eXperience. That's probably something every programmer, graphic designer and recruiter knows. Until now, everything is OK.

So, where's the confusion? The confusion starts when people consider that the User Experience is only related with the User Interface: ''that's the only thing the User is seeing, interacting with, so, UI it's the only issue that matters to their experience with the product/service''. This is the central problem: people are convinced that UX its a visual thing.

It's not. And not grasping what UX is making companies lose huge opportunities to generate value and be more competitive. So put attention to the following.

As UI is related to what the user sees and interacts with, UX is related with what experience the user has while is using the product or service. So, is much less concrete, visual, and very much more abstract than UI.

A pleased and satisfied user is a user with a different experience than a confused or impatience user. UX designers design the experience that the users will have. And this is not constrained to IT solutions!

So UX designers do not consider just the ''look and feel'' of the product or service: they should consider the Value, Usability, Accessibility and Desirability the product or service is offering (Frank Gao, 2012). These mains categories can be used to organise the multiple variables that impact the experience that the user will have using the product or service.

How do UX designers work? and, How it is different from UI designers?

The only way to know the experience of someone is asking. So UX designers should be experts in interviewing users. This mean, prepare tests, create ideal user profiles, recruit them, guide them in the test correctly and put the correct questions (interviews or surveys). In addition, UX designers will need the expertise to observe users while using the product, as well as inspecting the product by themselves. All of this -interviewing, observing and inspecting- is called UX research.

From the findings of UX research, UX designers create artefacts as Personas, User Journeys, Wireframings and Prototypes (lo-fi, mid-fi and hi-fi) of the product or service. These artefacts will now inform a new round or research with users. And again, and again, and again. In this way, improving the UX experience of the product or service continuously.

In the other hand, UI designers will be focused on the visual and functional aspects of the product or service, that they finally will develop normally with Photoshop, Illustrator, CSS and JavaScript languages (by frameworks as Bootstrap and React or Node, respectively). They will be busy transferring the UX design into astonishing and multi-platform interfaces.

Overall, the UX designer shouldn't have to demonstrate skills to ''code scalable CSS and JS'' as I read in a recent job announcement. The skill set of a UX designers are much more related to understand and communicate with diverse stakeholders, especially users, and prepare and analyse interviews, surveys and observations as well as create Personas, User Journeys, Wireframings and low fidelity prototypes.

In conclusion, this invites IT Product Managers, Developers and Recruiters to reflect about what are the risks and costs of underestimating the UX design, tasks and skills.

Finally, this excellent article by Emil Lamprecht covers more details and this video-lecture from Michigan University edX course (below) will give you a more relevant context and concrete examples.

If you liked this article and now do better understand the differences between UX and UI, share it with your network. If you have any question leave a comment.

About the author: Diego has been an entrepreneur, learning designer and project manager among others, and wants to use and promote user-centred design as a revolutionary force in the 21st century. He is a former Physics Teacher and now is studying the MSc in Digital Education at Edinburgh University. He is interested in Science, Technology, Education and Economic development. You can find him in Twitter at @RatesDiego .