UX / UI comparison

"The difference between User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) is that UI refers to the aesthetic elements by which people interact with a product, while UX is about the experience a user has with a product or service. So, UI focuses on visual interface elements such as typography, colors, menu bars, and more, while UX focuses on the user and their journey through the product."

For a website: What kind and how much content is presented and when/to whom (UX). How is the content being presented (UI)

"Imagine you’re designing a house. UX would be the foundation, while UI would be the paint and furniture."

UX Desing

User Experience Design

"UX design is about understanding the overall journey of your users and turning it into a product." UX design refers to the entire experience someone has with your product from start to finish. It attempts to answer the question: How can I help people achieve their goals (needs, desires...) in the simplest, most frictionless way possible?
In other words, UX design is concerned with the overall user-friendliness of an entire customer journey.

"UX as a category is not necessarily tied to websites. Steve Jobs famously included the experience of going to an Apple store as part of UX. Even the location had to be perfect. So how you buy a product, how you first see it—this is all important to UX."

UX employees don't necessarily have a design background. The could come from fields such as psychology, sociology, computer science...

Tasks

Research and strategy

• Plan: At the beginning of the UX design process, designers need to create a strategic plan that ensures stakeholders are aligned and working towards common goals>
• User research: While we often think of design as something visual, a UX designer’s work is mostly conceptual problem-solving based on research and data
• Information architecture: Information architecture (IA) focuses on organizing and labeling the content of a website, app, or product. The goal is to help users find information and accomplish their goals.

Wireframing and prototyping

• Creating the user flow: UX design is the process of speaking to users to pinpoint their needs, then devising the best user flow that will help them complete their tasks. This conceptual focus on the user journey means that a UX designer’s influence on how a final product actually looks is limited.
• Wireframing: A wireframe is like the skeleton of an interface—the bare minimum needed to understand how a design will work on a functional level. It can be produced digitally, or even drawn on paper.
• Testing: The best way for a UX designer to know if they’re doing their job right or not? Testing with real users. By testing early in the design process with a rough prototype—or even just a paper mockup—UX designers gather data from users to validate their ideas and assumptions.
• Analysis: UX designers work closely with product managers and researchers to analyze the test results and define the next steps

UI Desing

User Interface Design

A UI designer’s job begins where a UX designer’s job ends—at the prototyping stage. They take the wireframes and add visual design to make them usable, aesthetically appealing, and optimized for different screen sizes.

Tasks

The look and feel of the product

• Design research: Research provides information about users and competitors and gives insight into the latest design trends. This is crucial to meet client expectations.
• Visual design: UI designers are responsible for designing the product layout and all the visual elements of the user interface, including colors, fonts, icons, buttons, and more
• Branding and graphic development: UI design is closely informed by the brand positioning of the product overall. Designers have to strike the right balance between usability and consistently showcasing the brand identity established by the marketing or creative team. As a result, UI design is closely related to graphic design.
• Design systems: To ensure product and brand consistency, UI designers create style guides, pattern libraries, and components that detail how each element should look (color, font, etc.)

Web Design

Incorporates UX and UI design but not as specialized and deep. It's closer related to UI than UX. A freelance web designer does some UX automatically during meetings with the client to figure out what purpose the website should have, what the potential target group is, what and how much content to show. Creating rough wireframes in order to discuss placement of content and overall flow and functionality would be the next step

The UI part then is to create the styling in line with the clients brand language (if one exists) and to design the layout and styles (color, elements, typography etc.)

Estimated Salary

UX Designer: 60-150k, UI Designer: 50-130k, Web Designer: 40-100k