What’s the difference between UX design and UI design?
User Experience design and User Interface design are very close in their meaning. When we talk about User Experience, we mean the experience the user has while interacting with the product. UX contains everything that happens to a person while they’re using our website or application. If our UX design is good, our users can easily navigate through the interface, everything is logical and enjoyable. UX design not only plays a role in the designing phase, doing research on our target group’s behavior is also crucial for our end product to be successful.
In User Interface on the other hand the focus is on the visuals. To put it simply, with UI we try to represent our already existing content in the most desirable way. UI is the first thing our users notice, and their first access point to our product. Graphical User Interface makes up a large part of UI design, but it’s more than just style and graphics. Although it’s important to develop an aesthetic product, it also has to be optimized to be enjoyable and easy to handle. UX and UI designers need to work in a close collaboration to meet the needs of their future users.
Why is UX/UI important and how can it benefit you?
The main priority of digital marketing is to reach as many people as possible, encourage them to purchase our product, and possibly make them come back as regular customers. In order to make our product more popular with digital marketing, we use tools such as social media, applications or our own webpage. What we have to aim for is that the people visiting our interface, have to like to use it, and even might choose us over the concurrency. In order to achieve this, the users basically have to like what they see.
First, it has to be something that is able to catch the viewer’s eye. Second, people prefer to spend more time on pages that have a pleasant style. Not to mention that the proper design will be able to represent our brand, since it shows the customer what they can expect. With an elegant design we can assure that the customer is free to trust in the quality of our product. If we put aesthetics aside, the next important point is that it’s easy to handle our interface. People don’t want to spend too much time finding where the information they need is hidden in our application, or purchasing products in a webshop. We have to offer the quickest solution to our customers’ problems. Proper UX/UI design helps the user in finding what they need.
How to get better with UX/UI design?
Customers are necessary for a successful enterprise. With good UX/UI skills you can increase user satisfaction, and your chances of having a larger reach.
- Get familiar with design thinking! Design thinking is a way of creative problem solving. It’s a process of understanding how the users think.
- Do your research! You have to know your target group, get familiar with their needs.
- Get inspired by others! Feel free to take a look at others’ design ideas.
- Check your competitors! Find what are they good/bad at? What element of their UX/UI is good, what would you keep and what would you change?
- Take a look at popular design solutions! Stay up to date with current trends.
- Practice your graphic skills! With the use of graphic softwares make templates, design GUI elements.
- Take courses if you need! With UX/UI’s popularity rising, there are several courses that focus on the topic. There’s a wide range of free, or cheap online courses, youtube tutorials, and other useful sources on the internet that will help you to get better with UX/UI. You don’t have to look far, if you visit our Jump Academy, you’ll find a module on digital marketing.
Written by
ECOCENTER Team
