The Difference Between UI and UX

In today’s creative and technical environment, the terms “UI” (User Interface) and “UX” (User Experience) are being used more than ever. UI refers to the aggregation of approaches and elements that allow the user to interact with a system. This does not address details such as how the user reacts to the system, remembers the system and re-uses it. User experience is the goal. Not just the goal of an interface, but of a product or interaction with an organization. When good user experience is achieved, every desirable or positive effect that one could possibly think of flows from it. UX is focused on success of the whole. In reality, the product is not the sum of its parts; the experience is.

User interface is one of the most powerful tools at our disposal in the quest for great user experience. Why? Simply, the interface is the most tactile, visceral and visible method with which our users interact with us. UI is the front line. This is possibly the best explanation for why the two terms are so often used interchangeably or combined into one.

Some of the most common usage failure for the UI and UX terms is where it matters most: job listings and requirements. It is already difficult to locate excellent candidates for specialized jobs such as interface design and user experience design. But it’s certainly more difficult to hire the right person for the job when the skill set and design focus are miscommunicated. It’s expensive to hire a specialist, and it’s even more costly to hire one that cannot solve the problem you need solved. More often than not, the job requirements and responsibilities are skewed toward the UI designer job description but come loaded with the responsibility and expectation of a UX designer.


A UI designer may have the ability to create interactive designs, icons, colors, text, and affect a number of other elements that solve problems dealing with direct interactions to the user. Those elements are fantastic tools to affect user experience but they are only part of the equation. The user experience is influenced by a multitude of things such as marketing copy, speed, functional performance, color scheme, personality, customer support, set expectations, financial approach, visualization.

It isn’t fair or practical to tell the UI designer that they are responsible for all these things and more. It isn’t that user experience cannot be designed. If the situation were reversed for a UX designer it would be equally difficult. In order for a designer to rightly take ownership of the UX problem, they must be enabled to recommend and effect changes, implementations and decisions that control the experience. The flawed understanding is about designer focus and scope. It is not that one designer cannot handle both areas. It is about the tools and ability to problem solve. Effectively, a builder without any tools is just as powerless to build as a person with no skill or knowledge.

The Core UX Skills

The Core UX Skills are:

1. Information Architecture - Almost every design today involves organizing information, whether it's an online policies-and-procedures library, product information, or user-generated videos. Information architecture helps us organize that content in a way that makes it easy for users to hone in to the specific content they're seeking. Skills include understanding methods for organizing information, such as taxonomies, folksonomies, facets, and ontologies; techniques for deriving user hierarchies, such as card sorting; and creating design deliverables, such as site maps.
2. User Research - As we create designs, we need to ensure they meet the needs of the user. User research helps us collect information about who our users are, what they are trying to accomplish, what frustrates them, and what will delight them. Skills include identifying user population; techniques for evaluating design ideas, such as usability testing; and passing that information on to rest of the team members, so they can be making informed decisions.
3. Visual Design - One hallmark of good design is having a strong visual appearance. This is more than just aesthetic goodness, stretching into ensuring the priority of information is communicated visually -- the most important information jumps off the screen while more subtle details are visible, yet not demanding unwarranted attention. Visual design skills include page layout, form design, color selection, and icon design. (While not directly "visual", we consider designing for accessibility to fall into this skillset, as it focuses on much the same issues.)
4. Information Design - Presenting complex information for easy interpretation is key for a successful user interface. Knowing when to use specific table or graph types and using novel approaches for exploring detailed data sets, whether it's pricing information, product comparison tables, or trend charts, makes solid information design a core component of the design process. Skills include knowing when to apply the variety of chart and table formats, such as pie charts, hi-low diagrams, and cluster treemaps; how to create interactive data explorers, such as star fields and drill-down pivot tables; and working with combining multiple data sources, such as data-mining techniques.
5. Interaction Design - Modern applications have moved past filling out a one-page form and pressing the submit button. Instead, they are now complex interactions, combining business requirements with a easy-to-follow user flow. Interaction design skills include knowing when to utilize different application structures, such as hub-and-spoke designs versus interview flows; which design elements are best for certain types of information, such as when to use radio buttons versus drop-down menus; and creating design deliverables such as wireframes and design priority descriptions.
6. Fast Iteration Management - Today's best organizations are constantly learning from their designs. Instead of projects taking months or years, they now go from concept to implementation in weeks. Fast iteration management helps us learn to break designs into small, bite-sized implementations and to collect data from each deployment to inform the decisions in the next iteration. Skills include schedule planning, change management, and usage-data collection, to help the team move quickly.
7. Copywriting - Nobody likes using a design whose on-screen text reads like a 1950's Army instruction manual. The best user experiences have copy that excites and compels, making the user feel comfortable and secure about the design. Copywriting skills include identifying the style of voice and tone that matches the organization's brand, creating persuasive copy that motivates users to explore the design, and clearly stating benefit statements, to help the user understand the value of using new capabilities and functions.
8. Editing - What's not in a design is as important as what's included. Editing is not just about correcting bad grammar, but about creating a cohesive experience that doesn't have extraneous distractions. Skills include using techniques such as alignment maps to match the users' needs to the available functionality.

The Enterprise UX Skills

Along with the Core UX Skills, teams now need skills to enhance their value across the enterprise. User experience extends beyond the on-screen interactions to all touch points with the user. Special skills are needed to ensure the team interacts with the rest of the organization in a productive manner. While the teams don't need to know how to do the jobs of others in the organizations, they need to know how those other roles will influence the design. These Enterprise UX skills include:

1. Development Methods - Organizations are using a wide variety of development methods these days. Team members need to understand how to integrate their work with development approaches, such as Agile techniques.
2. Design-To-Development Documentation - Communicating the design and its rationale effectively is critical to successful projects. Developing personas, design pattern libraries, and use cases are a regular practice to ensure what is imagined becomes reality.
3. Web Analytics - Gleaning important information from the mounds of data collected by today's web servers can dramatically enhance the design process. Team members need to know how to integrate the available analytics to inform their design process, by seeing what designs are working for the users and where design iterations fall short.
4. Ethnography - Techniques like ethnography, contextual inquiry, and field research can help teams gain tremendous insights into the users' environment and goals, leading to radical improvements to the experience. Understanding how to facilitate ethnographic projects and how to report the results, using tools such as contextual modeling and personas, is important for today's teams.
5. Social Networks - Computer applications are no longer just a person interacting with a computer. Many are now computer-mediated experiences of people interacting with other people. Teams need to understand the different models for social interaction, from ratings and recommendation systems to full-blown social network capabilities, to know when these techniques can enhance the interaction and to avoid places where the social components take away from the core functionality.
6. Marketing - Previously relegated to an isolated function of the enterprise, marketing skills have become a core component in the user experience. Teams need to successfully communicate the design's value to users and need to ensure it blends seamlessly into the rest of the experience with the organization and the brand.
7. Technology - It is no longer acceptable for designers to propose interactions that can't be implemented because team member don't understand how the technology works. From front-end technology, such as CSS, Ajax, and Flash, to back-end components, such as server technology and legacy servers, designers need to be keenly aware of what is possible and where they will bump into constraints.
8. ROI - A successful UX team has the skills to explain the business value of their work. Whether it's a specific enhancement or a complete rethinking of the way things are done, team members need to concisely describe the benefits and risks associated with new design.
9. Business Knowledge - Today's business environment is full of complexity and hard-to-navigate constraints. Designers need to be fully aware of how the business works, how it makes money, and what the internal constraints are, so they can ensure the design services the business as well as the users.
10. Domain Knowledge - The industries we service are themselves very complex, whether they be about financial services, travel, or a university. Team members need to be fully versed in the domain, so they can understand the terminology, processes, and objectives of the people using their designs.