The principles of UI/UX design and the difference between UI and UX design.
Difference between UI and UX Design
UX design refers to the term “user experience design”, while UI stands for “user interface design”. Both elements are crucial to a product and work closely together. But despite their professional relationship, the roles themselves are quite different, referring to different aspects of the product development process and the design discipline. They both go hand-in-hand and there can be a bit of overlap in terms of what their roles are.
The primary difference between UX and UI is that UI is focused on the look and feel of an interface, whereas UX encompasses the entire user experience. UX creates a strategic foundation for a product, and UI makes it beautiful. UX requires research and brainstorming, whereas UI design is more surface-level.
To create an effective software product or website, you need UX and UI to work together. That is, you need UX principles to build the foundation, and then UI design to make it pretty, accessible, and easy to use. A UX designer considers the user’s entire journey to solve a particular problem; what steps do they take? What tasks do they need to complete? How straightforward is the experience?
As a UX designer, much of their work focuses on finding out what kinds of problems and pain points users come up against, and how a certain product might solve them. They’ll conduct extensive user research in order to find out who the target users are and what their needs are in relation to a certain product.
They’ll then map out the user’s journey across a product, considering things like information architecture — i.e. how the content is organized and labelled across a product — and what kinds of features the user might need then later create wireframes which serve as the skeleton of the product mapped out. The UI designer steps in to bring it to life. The UI designer considers all the visual aspects of the user’s journey, including all the individual screens and touchpoints that the user might encounter; think tapping a button, scrolling down a page or swiping through an image gallery.
Summary of the difference between UI and UX design:
- UX design is all about identifying and solving user problems; UI design is all about creating intuitive, aesthetically-pleasing, interactive interfaces.
- UX design usually comes first in the product development process, followed by UI. The UX designer maps out the bare bones of the user journey; the UI designer then fills it in with visual and interactive elements.
- UX can apply to any kind of product, service, or experience; UI is specific to digital products and experiences.
Principles of UI/UX design
1. Prevent Errors as much as possible
As a designer, you need to make the UI as easy to use as possible by preventing serious user errors. This is also where usability testing comes in. As a designer, everything has to work as intended by testing the design with users before launching. It not only helps to test the functionality and usability of your product but also helps you to understand your target audience’s needs better.
However, occasionally errors happen. So if a user has made an error, make sure to offer them a clear explanation to understand the error and an easy solution to solve it.
2. Keep the UI design simple
The most important of all the main UI design principles is simply not to forget who you are designing for, and why. Good UI design is practical; never decorative. Distracting from those elements that are truly relevant to the user, Aim for the minimum number of steps and screens possible at all times. Use overlays such as bottom sheets and modal windows to condense data and reduce your app’s footprint.
3. Flexibility
You not only need to make your user interface learnable for new users, but it should also have accelerators that help expert users speed up their processes. From novices to experts, ensure your product is flexible and efficient for all kinds of users. It should be easy for new users to learn and have shortcuts for experts to do things fast.
4. Familiarity
The best interfaces are familiar to users. Usability, i.e. how easily a user interacts with a product or a website, is closely related to familiarity. Users depend on elements and interfaces acting in a way that’s familiar to their digital experience. Users should never be in any doubt as to where they are within the software, nor as to what they need to do in order to get anywhere else they might want to go.
5. Putting the user’s in control
Generally in design users have a better experience if you give them control over where they are in the product and what they’re doing. The design should give users control in the process, and allow them to redo, undo and cancel an action that they have already taken. Another way to enhance control is by giving more advanced users (power users) ways to improve their efficiency. Keyboard shortcuts are a great way to do this, as well as templates and macros that let users accomplish repetitive functions more efficiently.
6. Clarity
In UI design, the term clarity means using recognizable features and elements that are intuitive to interact with. This is especially important for interactive elements such as buttons and navigation menus. In UI design, the term clarity means using recognizable features and elements that are intuitive to interact with. This is especially important for interactive elements such as buttons and navigation menus.
So when you create your product, ask yourself the following questions:
- Is your navigation intuitive? Are users directed and encouraged to move from one page to the next with ease?
- Have you used highly visible buttons that prompt user into clicking them?
- Is the purpose of each element on your product, website or application, clear and easy to understand?
