Robert Downey Jr

June 16th, 2022

UI and UX Design

First things first: What do UX and UI actually mean? The people you have eavesdropped on are actually discussing two professions that, despite having been around for decades, and in theory for centuries, have been defined by the tech industry as UX and UI design.

UX design refers to the term “”, while UI stands for “user interface design”. Both elements are crucial to a product and work closely together. But despite their professional relationship, the roles themselves are quite different, referring to very different aspects of the product development process and the design discipline.

User experience design is a human-first way of designing products. Don Norman, a cognitive scientist and co-founder of the , is credited with coining the term “user experience” in the late 1990s. Here’s how he describes it:

– Don Norman, Cognitive Scientist & User Experience Architect

Despite it being an older and more practiced field, the question of “What is user interface design?” is difficult to answer because of its broad variety of misinterpretations. While user experience is a conglomeration of tasks focused on the optimization of a product for effective and enjoyable use, user interface design is its complement; the look and feel, the presentation and interactivity of a product.

But like UX, it is easily and often confused by the industries that employ UI designers—to the extent that different job posts will often refer to the profession as completely different things.

If you look at , you will mostly find interpretations of the profession that are akin to graphic design, sometimes extending also to branding design, and even frontend development.