You might now often come across such concepts as UX and UI, but not everyone understands their meaning and the difference between them. Let’s try to figure it out together.
Whether you press buttons on an ATM, brew a cappuccino in a coffee machine, or swipe a button on the screen of a smartphone – these are all interfaces to interact with mechanisms. UX-design or user experience design is what an experience and an impression a user gets from working with your interface. Whether he/she is able to achieve the goal and how easy or difficult it is to do so.
Let’s take a simple example.
You have downloaded a new player on your smartphone, but it works exclusively in Japanese, which you do not understand. However, even without knowledge of Japanese, you can use the application without any discomfort, since its interface is intuitively understandable. It has buttons Play, Pause, Stop, play track and so on. After using this app for some time, you will not even pay attention to the fact that it is written in another language. This is an example of good UX-design.
UI design
UI-design, or the design of user interfaces, can be called a visual representation of UX-design. Its task is to make an application, website or other product intuitive, attractive and easy to use with clear graphics solutions.
UI-designer is responsible for how each separate screen or page will look like. The area of his responsibility is graphic control of elements, such as buttons and checkboxes, fonts, color schemes and various visual images.
UI-designer is responsible for how each separate screen or page will look like. The area of his responsibility is graphic control of elements, such as buttons and checkboxes, fonts, color schemes and various visual images.
What should a button look like to be easy to press? What font size should I choose to make a text readable? How to issue an error message so that it attracts attention, but does not irritate? These are questions to be answered by an UI-designer.
Summary
So to summarize, UX-design is a layout of an apartment and communications, and UI – the choice of wallpapers and flooring. However, in practice UX- and UI-designs are closely interrelated, the second logically follows the first, and often one and the same person is engaged in both. Therefore, the line between the two concepts is blurred to deliver the best results.
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