UI or UX?

Had a pretty intense conversation today about an MVP being developed and how to go about getting it across the line. The conversation was pretty much all about UX versus UI. As in many projects I have been involved, UI has taken a back seat to UX when developing the MVP. You've probably heard it ... "let's just get the overall process right" or "the colors don't matter, yet ... it just needs to work, so we can test it" ...

Now, we all know that the purpose of an MVP is to learn as much as possible about the features required by users. Sure. So it's easy to see why UX takes a front seat so often. But should it?

When we ask questions like "is this user friendly?" or "will users like this feature?" will we ever see true results and measures if we have not evoked any emotion when we turn our testing users loose?

Now granted, UI is a term synonymized with digital. So maybe that's why it is so often overlooked, but in today's world of end-to-end customer experience, to maximized your ROI on any interaction with the customer, I contend, it MUST have equal footing to drive real results that can be built, measured and scaled.

But to go back, if we are truly interested in whether "this is user friendly?" or "will users like this feature?" we need to provide them with an engagement that they only interact with functionally but emotionally as well. Let's not forget, consumers buy off of emotion, not features, so if an interface lacks connection, or does not visually evoke a response, the experience will surely fall short and opportunity is missed.

No longer should we pit UX AGAINST UI ... we should holistically align and merge UX AND UI to achieve innovation, transformation and change.