UX vs UI

What is UXD or UED?

User Experience Design is a design process whose sole objective is to design a system that offers a great experience to its users. UXD embraces the theories of several disciplines such as user interface design, usability, accessibility, information architecture, and Human-Computer Interaction, which refers to the overall interaction a person has with a product, app, service, or website. It’s the UX Designer’s job to make sure that interaction is intuitive, easy to understand, and positive.

Let’s take as an example an ecommerce website. If a customer finds the buying experience to be elongated, complex and complicated, then the UX experience will be an unpleasant one. The Shopify and Shopware are known to be platforms who are user friendly for ecommerce shops.

We must ensure that surfing a website using a mobile app or other platforms is not troublesome, or else communicating with a company’s digital products or services would be challenging. Numerous elements contribute to creating exceptional user experiences, such as user interface, usability, and user research.
If UXD is done well, it provides positive experiences that keep a user loyal to the product or brand. We try to understand and define customers’ journeys on products that are most conducive to the company’s success. 

It’s important to distinguish the total user experience from the user interface (UI), even though the UI is obviously an extremely important part of the design. For instance, consider a website with movie reviews. Even if the UI for finding a film is perfect, the UX will be poor for a user who wants information about a small independent release if the underlying database only contains movies from the major studios.

Don Norman, a psychologist and usability consultant who’s worked with Apple, HP, and the Nielsen Norman Group, is often credited as the father of UX.
Don Norman explains on his book the main principles of User Experience such as: 

•Feedback. Every action needs a reaction. 
•Affordance. Affordance is the relationship between what something looks like and how it’s use
•Mapping
•Constraints
•Consistency

There are three ways that a good design is going to give you a pleasant experience according to Don Norman, visceral, behavioral, and reflective.
To put it simply, UX is important because it tries to fulfill the user’s needs. It aims to provide positive experiences that keep users loyal to the product or brand. Additionally, a meaningful user experience allows you to define customer journeys on your website that are most conducive to business success.

UI comes as a second step, after the user experience is done and has been confirmed. UI refers to the aesthetic elements by which people interact with a product, deals with the interaction between users and computer systems. Afterwards the UI designer’s job is to fill in the visual and interactive elements.

If you love to design the product, to decide the overall layout, size, color the animation part and present that with your creative thought process, then UI is better for you.

There are some steps to design a UI:

Step 1: Understand your customers and their values
Step 2: Research the competition
Step 3: Sketch out your product
Step 4: Design your product
Step 5: Implement the solution onto a webpage
Step 6: Evaluate the work and improve it

At the end, neither UX, or UI can’t stand without one another, both are equally important, because their roles represent different things. When it comes to merging both of them in one piece as a whole, the product is ready for sale, and no doubt the product is sold.

If all the above information feels overwhelming and you can’t optimize your shop in a user friendly way, solution25 outsourcing team can be the ecommerce agency that can assist you on this matter.