It’s hard to find a more confusing term in web development than “user interface design.” Some people think it means the same thing as UX design, others think it means visual design only, and still, others think it’s just a fancy name for the graphics that go into any website or application. But what does UI design mean? And why does it matter?
What is UI design?
UI design is creating the visual elements of an app or website. It’s what users see and interact with, but it’s not about the functional aspects of a product. It’s about how it looks and feels.
UI designers are responsible for ensuring that all the parts of your system work together to create a seamless user experience (UX). They should think about what you’re trying to accomplish with your product, then design something that will help you get there.
User experience (UX) is a user’s overall feeling when using a product or service. It’s made up of many different parts, including:
- The interface—how easy it is to use, how intuitive, and how well it matches your goals for the user.
- The content is the words you choose and the visuals you use to communicate with users.
- The performance includes load time and speed of interactions on mobile devices and computers.
The elements of UI design
User interface (UI) design is a user experience (UX) design that focuses on an application or website’s interactive elements. This includes buttons and windows to menus and icons and more abstract elements such as screen transitions and animations.
UX and UI working together
It’s important to remember that UX and UI are two sides of the same coin. UX design is about how people use a product—what they do with it in real life. The UI (user interface) part of the equation deals with how it looks and works.
UI design has to be user-friendly for a product to be successful. Still, there’s more than aesthetics involved: UI designers describe themselves as responsible for everything from “interaction design” to “information architecture,” which can get pretty complex!
UX designers help their clients understand how their users interact with their products; then, they use this information as input when designing features or functionality within those products. If you think about it like this, you’ll start seeing why UX designers are so important: They’re figuring out what makes people tick before they’ve even built anything!
It’s possible to have a great-looking interface that hurts people’s user experience.
It’s possible to have a great-looking interface that hurts people’s user experience. Let me give you an example. A lot of people think that having a lot of content on the screen is bad for users because it makes them more distracted, but this isn’t true at all—you are hard-wired to pay attention to certain things over others, so if you want your visitors to focus on something important, putting it in front of them will help make sure they see it. What matters is how you arrange the elements on the page and what kind of visual hierarchy those elements have.
Conclusion
So, what is UI design? It’s a combination of art and science that aims to make technology more accessible to everyone. It’s about balancing functionality with aesthetics, making sure the things people interact with every day are easy to understand and use without being too cluttered or complicated. This field has so much potential to change how you work together as humans—but you can only do it if everyone understands what they need from their devices before they buy them!
