ux makes app and website interfaces useful while ui makes the same interface beautiful
and product design does both making the interface useful as well as aesthetically pleasing
so what is the distinction between user experience design user interface design
and product design ux designers are primarily concerned with the usability of the product
they focus on how the product works ui designers focus on the visuals and the aesthetic experience
of the product and product designers do both they do ux design and then they do ui design they focus
on the overall feeling and the experience of the product both from the ux and the ui
perspective i would say the term product designer encompasses both skill sets and responsibilities
my experiences product designers are usually ux designers mainly they do have a stronger ux side
i'm not saying they are bad at ui design they can do ui design really well as well but the ux skills
are a little bit stronger than the ui design skills let me know if you experienced otherwise
okay so let's define these two terms ux design or user experience design is about designing the
whole experience for example think about an app ux designers help decide the features what should be
in the app and how it should work while ui design or user interface design is about designing the
visual experience they also design the same app but they are responsible for the look of the
application the distinction between the two roles isn't that simple though because if you work for a
larger organization the two roles have overlapping areas and they need to work collaboratively and if
you work for a smaller company it's required to do both well so that's why companies came
up with the new terminology okay it's not that new so that's why companies came up with a new
terminology product designer so how do ux and ui designers collaborate during a design process
research and ux design is usually the first step when deciding to build a product or an application
ux designers are in charge of the research that will validate or invalidate the initial product
idea and it will guide the product development after the prototype has gone through multiple
iterations and it is finalized well at least for the time being the ui designer steps in and
starts working on the visual design interaction design including micro interactions in an ideal
product design and development where this would be a linear journey however and i'm sure you guessed
this is not the case it really depends on many factors but in my experience one of the most
determining factors is basically whose charge of the ux and who's charge of the ui design
is it the same person is it the same team or is it a completely different team within the company
let's take a look at the tasks that ux and ui designers do so that we can see where they overlap
and where they are different ux design starts with the research understanding users behavior
they run discovery workshops both with users and the product development team to understand
the problems that need to be solved once the problem identified they conceptualize solutions
they usually come up with different ideas and wireframes then ux designers prepare prototypes
for usability testing and just so you know this doesn't need to be a high fidelity prototype it
could be a pen and paper low fidelity prototype once they figure out the best solution to the
problem they hand over the wireframes the concepts to the ui designer from here ui designers use this
information to create visually appealing and easy to understand interfaces to give you a tangible
example let's just have a look at skyscanner let's take a look at the screen so what do you
think who did what which part of the website was done by a ux designer which part of the website
was done by ui designer i would encourage you to pause this video and just have a think on your own
so ux designers decided how the search functionality works and what people want out of
search they decided how many options are shown on the search result page and how filtering works on
the sub page and then then the ui designer's task would be to take all of that and make it clear
how those things work we can easily see how this list is sorted because the ui designer applied a
darker color to highlight the selected sorting option both areas are equally important when it
comes to designing a product because you can create a great user experience but if the ui
doesn't show clearly what's happening then it's not a good user experience so overall it's not
a good product design the overlap between ux and ui designers occurs where there is
a connection between conceptual and visual work for instance ui designers might do wireframing
and ux designers might be required to do high fidelity mockups it really depends on the company
and the actual job description and i understand it can be confusing because whenever you go to
a job site companies using ui design ux design and product design terminology interchangeably
you need to read the job description to determine what you actually signing up for by taking the
job if you see ux / ui designer position that is essentially a product designer position
and the company would like you to do a little bit of both as you can see it is nearly impossible
to separate ux from ui and ui from ux design i created a free guide for you so if you would like
to get your own copy then head over to my website to download it the link is in the description box
thank you so much for hanging out with me today my name is Niki, and i see you next time bye