UI / UX Design

Best Approach to User Experience Design

Good user experience design is always part of product development process. You interact with your users to build the unique combination of structure, content and user experience that will accomplish required goals in efficient ways.

“The primary factor of your success lies in the fact that you keep your user in center of your design process.”

This approach allows you to create designs that are clean, simple, intuitive, flexible and engaging, and provide a WOW experience to your users and thus differentiate you from your competitors.

The Difference Between UX and UI Design

UX Design refers to the term User Experience Design, while UI Design stands for User Interface Design. Both elements are crucial to a product and work closely together. But despite their professional relationship, the roles themselves are quite different, referring to very different parts of the process and the design discipline. Where UX Design is a more analytical and technical field, UI Design is closer to what we refer to as graphic design, though the responsibilities are somewhat more complex.

What is User Interface (UI) Design?

User interface (UI) design is the process of making interfaces in software or computerized devices with a focus on looks or style. Designers aim to create designs users will find easy to use and pleasurable. UI design typically refers to graphical user interfaces but also includes others, such as voice-controlled ones.

Designing UIs for User Delight

User interfaces are the access points where users interact with designs. Graphical user interfaces (GUIs) are designs’ control panels and faces; voice-controlled interfaces involve oral-auditory interaction, while gesture-based interfaces witness users engaging with 3D design spaces via bodily motions. User interface design is a craft that involves building an essential part of the user experience; users are very swift to judge designs on usability and likeability. Designers focus on building interfaces users will find highly usable and efficient. Thus, a thorough understanding of the contexts users will find themselves in when making those judgments is crucial. You should create the illusion that users aren’t interacting with a device so much as they’re trying to attain goals directly and as effortlessly as possible. This is in line with the intangible nature of software – instead of depositing icons on a screen, you should aim to make the interface effectively invisible, offering users portals through which they can interact directly with the reality of their tasks. Focus on sustaining this “magic” by letting users find their way about the interface intuitively – the less they notice they must use controls, the more they’ll immerse themselves. This dynamic applies to another dimension of UI design: Your design should have as many enjoyable features as are appropriate.

UI vs. UX Design

Often confused with UX design, UI design is more concerned with the surface and overall feel of a design, whereas the latter covers the entire spectrum of the user experience. One analogy is to picture UX design as a vehicle with UI design as the driving console. In GUIs, you should create pleasing aesthetics and animations that convey your organization’s values and maximize usability.

What is User Experience Design?

User experience design is a human-first way of designing products.

As is found on Wikipedia:

● User experience design (UXD or UED) is the process of enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty by improving the usability, ease of use, and pleasure provided in the interaction between the customer and the product.Clear, right? Well you might note immediately that despite what I implied in the introduction, the definition has no reference to tech, no mention of digital, and vague at best. But like all professions, it’s impossible to distill the process from just a few words.

Some confusion in the definition of the term itself is due to its youth. Don Norman, a cognitive scientist and co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group Design Consultancy, is credited with inventing the term in the late 1990’s declaring that “User experience encompasses all aspects of the end-user’s interaction with the company, its services, and its products.”This implies that regardless of its medium , UX Design encompasses any and all interactions between a potential or active customer and a company. As a scientific process it could be applied to anything, street lamps, cars, Ikea shelving and so on. In the video below, we pit a banana against a pineapple to demonstrate this point.However! Despite being a scientific term, its use since inception has been almost entirely within digital fields; one arguable reason for this being that the industry started blowing up around the time of the term’s invention. Another arguable reason being that it was just a fancy way of rewording a practice that has already existed for hundreds of years known as “Market Research”; and boy do designers love fancy.But don’t let me confuse you, User Experience Design is not a market research job.Though it does utilize many of the same techniques to achieve a complex end goal: The structure, analysis and optimization of a customer’s experience with a company and its products.

If you’ve never seen User Experience work in practice, never even used the term at work, it’s still difficult to imagine what User Experience Designers actually do. At CareerFoundry we’ve developed a UX course that focuses on the process which I will use to illustrate the profession.

What is UI Design?

Despite it being an older and more practiced field, the question of “ What is user interface design? ” is difficult to answer by its ranging variety of misinterpretations. While User Experience is a conglomeration of tasks focused on optimization of a product for effective and enjoyable use; User Interface Design is its compliment, the look and feel, the presentation and interactivity of a product. But like UX, it is easily and often confused by the industries that employ UI Designers. To the extent that different job posts will often refer to the profession as completely different things.

If you look at job posts for User Interface Design, you will mostly find interpretations of the profession that are akin to graphic design. Sometimes extending also to branding design, and even front end development.

If you look at expert definitions of User Interface Design, you will mostly find descriptions that are in part identical to User Experience design. Even referring to the same structural techniques.

Let’s have a quick look at the UI designer’s responsibilities: