Summary
What are UX and UI design and why should you care? We live in a digital age when a business’s success depends on both the user’s experience and interface with its products. Products include saleable items but also anything your potential customer uses to interact with you including your website, social media accounts and digital marketing ads! Investing up front in these areas by employing competent UX and UI designers like those at CupOCode will help you not just reach your target audience, but keep them coming back for more.
An Overview of UX/UI Design and Why It Matters
Anytime you’ve interacted with a website, an app on your phone or an order kiosk at say Taco Bell, you’ve experienced the marriage of UX and UI design. But what are they and why should you care? Let’s discuss these two collaborative concepts and how each plays a crucial role in a digital product’s development. Let’s start with UX.
UX = User Experience
UX design refers to “User Experience” and conveys the process of brainstorming, prototyping and testing a product for human use. Anything that can be experienced, whether physically or digitally, can benefit from thoughtful UX development: a new car, an office building, a website, or even a visit to a coffee shop. UX aims to understand what the customer wants and designs a product or service to fulfill that want by analyzing competitors and potential audience, wireframing the product structure and strategy, testing the product with target audiences, and developing content.
UX typically takes place at the front end of a product’s development, mapping out the bare bones of the user’s experience. These designers troubleshoot potential problems that could hinder the user experience with the product. For instance, when designing a new coffee shop, UX addresses issues such as
- location (proximity to potential customers),
- logistics (how easy it will be to get in and out),
- interior traffic flow (bathroom, table and counter placement for instance), and
- product variety (alternative milk options, types of coffee, cup sizes, etc.).
UI = User Interface
UI design refers to “User Interface” and is a strictly digital term that describes the process of designing the point of interaction between a user and a digital device or product. Designers translate the UX blueprint into a polished, aesthetically pleasing, branded and ready-to-use digital product. Selections such as button design, icons, animations, typography and color palette fall under the role of UI. Additionally, UI designers create a style guide, develop more dressed out wireframes, and test these prototypes out with audiences to finetune user responsiveness.
UI works in tandem with UX development, carrying the product into marketable existence. Their priority focuses on intuitiveness, or a more microscopic look at how smoothly the customer will be able to interact with the product. Issues addressed by UI might include
- legibility (what typeface or colors work best for readability),
- consistency (unifying the visual appearance for flow and branding)
- guidance (how best to direct a user through the screen interface), or
- device adaptation (designing the product to fit all potential screen sizes).
Why Both UX + UI Matter
In many ways, the difference between UX and UI designers resembles the difference between an engineer and a decorator. UX maps out the digital product’s architectural structure including delivery of the product or service while UI adds lighting, furniture and signage to assist the user in visually understanding the product and how to engage with it. An app or website with poor UX design might be clunky with tons of bugs, have confusing navigation, load like a slug and overall frustrate the user, even if the UI is well done. Meanwhile, good UX but poor UI might result in difficulty navigating due to poor button placement, color contrast, font selection or spacing, likewise frustrating the user. A digital product’s success or failure hinges on BOTH strong UX and UI design.
One Last Illustration
Still not convinced how UX/UI affects a business? Drop a kid off at school using the carpool lane, and chances are you will experience poor UX/UI design. Take that same kid through the Chick-fil-A drive thru though after school, and you’ll see what excellent UX/UI design accomplishes with the customer. Not only does Chick-fil-A offer a highly marketable product in their tasty chicken, but the EXPERIENCE of going there is unrivaled due to their speed and efficiency (UX) as well as their easy-to-use ordering system (UI). I don’t know about you, but if I had to choose between picking the kids up from school or dropping by Chick-fil-A to pick up dinner, even if it was rush hour on a Friday after payday, I’d choose the latter every time.
In Summary
At the end of the day, we live in a digital age when a business’s success depends on both the user’s experience and interface with its products. Products include saleable items but also anything your potential customer uses to interact with you including your website, social media accounts and digital marketing ads! Investing up front in these areas by employing competent UX/UI designers like those at CupOCode will help you not just reach your target audience, but keep them coming back for more.
#TeamChickFilA
