What is ux/ui design
It is surprising how often these two get entwined, mixed up, misused, and misunderstood. The two are unique concepts, but, UI is a component of UX, which contributes to the mix up. To simplify it, begin with the person, the “user”. The person wants to do something. The person needs some way, needs some “thing” to accomplish what the person wants.
The “thing” is a computerized system, be it a financial business system or a game. Going forward the word “system” will stand in for “computerized system”. In simple terms UI is what a person uses, does, sees, and hears to accomplish what the person wanted when the person uses the system. In simple terms UX is how the person feels about the system after using the system to do what was wanted.
This is the point of the word “experience”. It encompasses everything and anything the person experienced in accomplishing the person’s goal. Was the goal achieved? Was using the system fun, easy, simple, and straightforward? Did the person enjoy using the system? Were instructions and options and menus and buttons and hotspots clear? Did the system work as expected? Did it do everything that was needed? Was the system easy on the eyes, easy to understand? Add to this any other question on how the person felt about the system.
A website owner wants each person who visits to have the best experience. Why? Again, it is very simple. People like to revisit and redo a pleasant, fun, successful experience. The website owner wants the user interface to be a driving force in giving the website visitor a wonderful experience. It begins with knowing the likely audience that will visit the website, and knowing what will bring that audience that wonderful experience.
Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
The successful, wonderful “User Experience” that one wants to provide does not occur by chance. Like anything and everything around building a system, the experience must be designed to be successful, to be wonderful. That success comes from the design team’s experiences, the experiences of people who have used similar systems, and even the expectations of people who want to accomplish what this system is supposed to provide, as well as the sources of both wonderful and awful experiences.
This leads to knowing what the design wants to have and what it wants to avoid. Begin the designing by documenting the “good”, the “bad”, and the “ugly” aspects of former experiences, as well as desired experiences. Leave nothing out because one does not know what experience might be worthwhile, good or bad, when it comes to building the system.
Continue designing by putting form around the experiences, such as colors people like to see (and do not like to see), Also, as the designing begins, expect to “not use” or discard process flows, layouts, sketches, and ideas. Do not actually throw things away. Just put them aside, because a discarded idea might resurrect as the design gels and matures.
In addition, engage some people not on the design team to give very honest opinion on assumptions, ideas, sketches, and whatever the team documents as a part of the design. These honest opinions can save from losing hundreds of repeat visitors. This UX designing will save development resources (time, money, sanity) from being wasted on rewrites later. One of the essential activities during this designing is the “testing”, the verification of the rough ideas being put into place. This is done with the non-team experienced people and can be a simple “What do like, not like about this idea, or assumption, or sketch or whatever.
This helps weeding through the collection of experiences the team will have as the starting point.
Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
is a role that evolved out of the need to have a person with the experience to know what is necessary for UX design and how to balance the many aspects of UX design that conflict. The conflicts arise from the desire to be bleeding edge in creativity with the need to be usable given the diverse experiences with computers that the communal audience will have.
This role is key to the UX design activity. The role of UX Designer actually has a number of different names in the industry: UX designer, UX architect, UX consultant. While the name differences can be by company, or by money paid, or overall experience, UX designer typically encompasses all aspects of UX designing, including visual design and the incorporation of corporate branding in the UX design.
The role has expand in recent years to also include information architecting, verification / testing, and all design considerations. As a practioner in a role that continues
to evolve, the UX Designer manages both the creative aspects of the design and the usability desired in the design.
It is an industry belief and concern that these two areas of design too often clash as the overall design seeks to achieve “usefulness”. While the creative design pushes the design to be innovative to enhance the experience, the usability concerns struggle to keep the design in line for those who are not computer-savvy or heavy users.
The flip-side of this coin is that the struggle and resolution of the conflicting design aspect is what leads to a solution that industry entitles as “world class”. High level combining of the creative and usability is what UX designing is all about. This combining leads to innovation in the balancing of the creative and the usable, using technology innovations that increase the ways a person can interact / interface with a system.
A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
UX comes to the system user by means of the UI. UX manifests itself (or should manifest itself) through the UI. To twist a phrase, “a usable (usability) interface is the superior experience over a pretty, but clunky, design.” It is all about the targeted audience.
This collection of people will have the final say on the implemented design. It is always essential to measure and metric how the targeted audience responds to the UI, capturing the audience experience. As a possible design element, consider functionality that allows a user / visitor to state what was experienced. Measurable questions and free form comments go a long way towards understanding audience experience.
UI and UX often clash as UX design moves into UI design. The artistic nature of UX design eventually falls into the reality, sometimes harsh, of technological limitations in UI design. While it may be a wonderful experience to have pretty fluttering butterflies all over the screens while the user works, it becomes a negative if all of the fluttering causes the system to be only half as efficient as it could be. Or, interpret eye flicks to drive the screen, but what happens if the user gets a twitch? Good UI designers know how to determine how far the UX design can realistically be implemented in a system.
They continually plan, code, verify, and assess prototyped code’s usability versus the experience. With the UX
Designer involved, the UI Designer works and reworks the evolving system into a final state that does the job in the most pleasant, worthwhile way.
Another way of looking at it, the UX gets the audience in the first time, but the UI-UX is what gets the audience to be repeat visitors. Every system owner wants the audience to be repeat visitors.