UX - UI Friends or Rivals?
When we do research about user experience, each one of the articles and publications we found about the topic concludes UX is ‘something’ useful, helpful, accessible, attractive, fun and satisfying. The product or service should be easy to use. Finding or acquiring it should be easy as well. Learning how to use it shouldn’t be anything out of this world. Interacting with it should be entertaining and more important, the product or service should fulfill its purpose: to satisfy my needs as a user. UX / UI not only explores the functionality and interactivity of products and services, but these topics also analyze the visual impact of the user experience.
- UI: How it looks? (interface) visual design
- UX: How it feels? (experience) non-visual design
To me, one shouldn’t exist without the other. However, in the past months, while learning more about UX and UI, I discovered there are professionals who specialize in each aspect of the user experience individually. They focus either on UX or UI alone. Like me, there are a lot of beginners who are just learning to differentiate both areas. That’s why I decided to create this post, to share some high-level thoughts on UX and UI.
The Basics
UX: The Researcher
UX looks to understand and generate solutions to users' problems. The UX process is developed based on 5 key questions:
- What do users need? (Value)
- How do they do it now? (Usability)
- What do they desire? (Desirability)
- Where do users look for the product/ service? (Adoptability)
Some people might think of the researcher as a rare breed of half a psychologist and half designer. After all, they need to understand how people accomplish tasks.
UI: The Architect
While UX does research and comes up with insights and hypotheses, UI builds prototypes. UI’s main task is to develop visual representations on what could be the final product or service.
The architect is a curious character that is aware we pick up information from websites following an F-pattern way called saccades. He also knows how to attract attention utilizing visual principles like colors, proximity, symmetry, and movement, but far more important, a good architect knows the limits of human memory. You can’t ask a user to memorize stuff over and over again.
Common Grounds
The Architect and the Researcher complement each other, they might not be experts on every user experience discipline, but they do share knowledge and concepts. After all, they have to work together to create amazing and useful designs. Some of the concepts they both have to know are related to the so-called gulfs of execution and evaluation:
- Gulf of Execution, where a user tries to figure out how a product/ service operates.
- Gulf of Evaluation, where a user tries to understand what happened when he interacted with the product/ service.
Did you know online systems should strive for <100 msec response time otherwise they should incorporate icons to indicate the system is busy? This is part of some design guidelines to help bridge the gulf of execution. There are more and they all are a google search away.
The Researcher and The Architect are after the same goal: to develop useful and engaging products and services that help solve users’ problems. They are friends, not rivals! This is a very basic approach to UX and UI, but I hope it serves as an introduction to these amazing topics. Go explore!
Special thanks to Coursera, University of Michigan, and California Institute of the Arts for all the useful content!
- https://coursera.org/share/eb18c39c3d422c7f8820231fb87bc26f
- https://coursera.org/share/b173df4a0de63e68486fc5bcd88a5d43
- https://coursera.org/share/fa689e79a7e5cbfb791ab9ff6bba9bf7
- https://coursera.org/share/660ff8bdd05953bcd8c877a65a46393b