What Is the Difference Between UI and UX Design?
User interface and user experience are completely different, and yet you cannot have one without the other. UI and UX design can be found in anything that needs a user’s response, such as at movie kiosks, ATMs, websites, online shopping carts, self-checkout machines, and more. In today’s blog, we will look at UI and UX design in terms of how they fit in web design and what makes them necessary in their individual ways.
What is User Interface?
User interface, in web design, is the main display that people will see when they are on your website. UI design is pretty much the look of your site and its responsiveness. A good UI design is one that is mobile-friendly (can be viewed on a mobile device and desktop computer without losing its responsiveness). All the buttons and links should work properly for a UI design to be good. Otherwise, users will leave your site because they will think it is outdated, unreliable, and unprofessional.
How can you make sure that you have a good user interface when making your web design? By doing the following actions:
- Create a responsive web design
- Make sure all links are up-to-date
- Make sure images are clear and attract visitors (image colors should be taken into consideration, since colors affect people’s emotions)
- Your logo design should be placed at the top where it can be seen first thing
Keep in mind that user interface consists of making sure that users like the design and respond to it positively.
What is User Experience?
User experience, in web design, is the content and how it makes the user feel. For instance, when the user reads the text on your website’s homepage, is he or she likely to open another page of your site? How about if users read your blogs? Does the content interest your website visitors? UX design is all about how the user responds emotionally toward what you put on your site. This includes but is not limited to:
- Images
- Blogs
- Videos
- Calls-to-action
- Landing pages
- Polls
- Colors
If you can make users respond positively to these above things, you would have a good UX design.
So, What Is the Difference Between UI and UX Design?
User interface is different from user experience because one (UI design) is about the clarity and effectiveness of the machine (the web design look) and the other (UX design) is about the way it makes users feel (content that lets users connect and relate).
For example, if you visit our website TCDGstudios.com you would notice that we have a responsive design that uses parallax is certain areas around the site. This is all about the user interface (what the user sees first hand and whether that leads the user to continue browsing the site). On the other hand, if you click on our blogs to read some of our informative content (such as this blog), you will notice the user experience taking effect. How the content of our blogs make you feel is just as important as how likely you are to continue browsing the site.
While UI design and UX design are different, you need both to have a successful web design that keeps visitors happy and coming back time and again.