In any business, it is important to understand what the consumer wants and how that can be accomplished. The latter part is more definitive. Former is heuristics and instincts. On front end part of product development – these two answers are resolved by UI/UX designers. Unfortunately, the definition of UI/UX is often blurry for most.

Let’s address the big elephant: UX stands for User Experience and UI stands for User Interface.

What is UI? When a sale needs to be made on the screen of an e-commerce site, the screen would need certain components like logo, cart button, checkout button, etc. This screen is the interface. Designing the components and placing them optimally is a part of interface design. A UI designer works off the layouts created, connect with the backend and brings them to life.

What is UX? When a sale needs to be made on the screen of an e-commerce site, certain design choices need to be made like – what kind of information should be displayed on the screen, how will the user navigate up to check out in an easy fashion, etc. These choices are based on consumer behavior, trends and sometimes plain common sense. The output of such brainstorming is a layout that becomes a blueprint for UI Development.

How UI and UX are related? The relationship between UI and UX is simple. UI focusses on answering the question ‘how it looks on screen?’ while UX answers – ‘how it feels to be on the other side of the screen?’.

 

~S