UI & UX design are the terms that are more often being used interchangeably, but in reality, both UX design and UI design mean very different things. Most of us have overheard conversations, walking down the world of tech capitals hip streets, discussions about the poor UI of the website or great UX of any product.
Is it a language you are never going to be privy to? Or these are just slang that is being used to look cool? Are you keen to learn about UI and UX design and want to know more about UI vs UX? You have to go to the right place. Let’s have a look at the breakdown of UX design vs UI design to make things more understandable for you:
UX design vs UI design: Things you need to know
UI and UX design overlap more often, but this is pretty clear that these are different from many aspects. Even though these are having a pretty close relationship in the process of a product design but both serve different roles.
So, to make a better understanding let’s have a look at a detailed comparison between UI vs UX design.
UX and UI Defined
Let’s have a look at brief descriptions of both UI and UX design to know how these are different:
Introduction to User Experience design

User experience design is a way to develop relationships with a company, its services or products and the customers. User experience design is based on researching, building, and improving entire aspects of user interaction with the products of the company, to make its users satisfied.
- The main goal is to improve the experience of users with the products via test results and consequently, creating a product that is valuable, creative, and useful. Also, this must be easier to obtain and completely pleasing to use.
- UX design can contribute to a product providing an amazing yet effective user experience. It will include multiple disciplines such as interaction design, usability, visual design, and more.
Introduction to User Interface design

However, on the other hand, the user interface is a product’s visual appearance. While the User interface designers design the visual design of the product to ensure an effective user experience. A good UI design can help in attracting users and ensuring a pleasant experience with a product.
- The major elements of a UI design include content just like text, documents, images, forms, videos, buttons, tags, fields, checkboxes, graphic designs, elements behavior such as what will happen when a user will drag, click, or enter something.
- User interface designers must have a good understanding of technical skills and aesthetics to develop an attractive and intelligent user-interface design. Because the UI designer used to have a creative role in the team to create a compelling, yet efficient user-interface that can elicit an emotional response from the consumers.
Just simply understand the fact that, if you are seeing a website and marvel at how visually appealing it is, then it is mainly because of its UI design.
User Interface vs User Experience Design
Here are some of the fundamental UI vs UX design options that you must know:
Focus difference
One of the most important differences between UI and UX design is that they are having different prototyping uses. In UI designs, prototypes need to be a hi-fi model, however, in UX design logic is more important to be cared about.
The reason behind this is pretty straightforward to understand. UI designers have to pay more attention to the frontend of the product and see how to make the product more appealing visually. However, User
UX is about what user needs and UI is about what users see
In a UX design there comes a complete phase of ideation, creation, implementation and delivery. It is because UX is known to be more of a technical component to produce. While, on the other hand a UI design is a more artistic component to be. Because it is related to the interface and design more than the backend functionality of the product.
UI design will affect what the user is seeing visually. While UX design comes up with more social and technical aspects to understand the needs of end-users.
How UI and UX design work together?
Basically, a UI designer will decide how the user-interface will look. While on the other hand, a UX designer will decide how the interface is going to work. In general, UI and UX design are pretty collaborative processes and both designers have to work closely to make a successful product.
Because the UX team is going to work on the flow of an application or website. They will decide whether any extra button or field has to be added to the screen to make the process more seamless?
While the UI team will work on how all the interface elements will appear on the screen to offer a good and visually appealing site or app in the best possible way. And the team will decide where you can add the extra button or field on the screen to make it look attractive and in design in a more effective way.
A UX design is interested in user expectations particularly. All of the interactions and experiences users are going to have with different apps or sites will set their expectation levels. And a UX designer has to be familiar with these expectations to make its design more effective as per users’ point of view.
Overall, both UI and UX designs have to be executed flawlessly with the expectations of the user to bring success to the project.
Final thoughts
UI and UX design more often are interchangeable, but these come up with differences in actuality.
A UX design basically determines how users will interact with a product, while the UI determines how people will feel when seeing a design with its feel and look. UX is concerned with conceptual aspects while UI is all about aesthetic aspects of a product.
Knowing about different aspects of UI vs UX in detail, you certainly got a better idea of how these are different in terms of meaning, functionality, and end-results, for sure.