UX Design, UI Design and Software Development
Imagine that you have just found $10-million dollars in a long-forgotten bank account. Maybe your rich Aunt Sue left it for you to discover when you became wise enough to use it properly. So now you’re planning to have a custom home built. Who do you hire first, a designer or a builder?
Of course, if you want a unique house, customized to your tastes, you hire a designer first – they are usually architects. An architect will interview you to turn your vision or “imagined user experiences” into a planned sequence of experiences called a home. Architects usually build 3D models and make 3D drawings of what you have in mind. If these sequenced imagined experiences were for an interface to a computer application, the UX (user experience) designer would be turning what potential users describe into “wireframes and prototypes”. You get just the basic skeleton blueprints sometimes or a fully-realistic walk-through prototype. What both of these design professionals are doing can be called “user research” because you will be the “user” of the new house or the application.
UX / User Experience Design Defined:
- Always immersed in a user-perception-first approach
- Does wireframing and prototyping
- Does user testing of mockups and prototypes
- Creates personas, user journey maps and user flow diagrams
UI / User Interface Design Defined:
- Usually focused on the visual appearance of the interface
- Involved in mixing graphic images and web browser technology code (HTML5, CSS, JavaScript)
- Connects the interactive front-end interface to the software's procedural back-end
Software Development Defined:
- The process of conceiving, specifying, designing, programming, documenting, testing, and bug fixing involved in creating and maintaining applications, frameworks, or other software components. Software development is a process of writing and maintaining the source code. - Wikipedia
According to Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO – a global design company, “In the past, design work was usually left until later in the software development process, at which point the designer would attempt to make the software aesthetically appealing. But today, when your customers expect to be delighted by your software, UX is critical. Designers of experiences who use ‘design thinking’ have the ability to 'create ideas rather than to simply dress them up.' ”
Going back to my analogy, carpenters or building contractors (or UI designers) are usually not involved in the user interview or in designing your dream home. They do what’s necessary to get it built. There are exceptions to that on occasion when an architect is also a building construction contractor. A UX designer can also be a UI designer-developer. I am like that. I am more designer than developer but I do both. When I was in architecture school, one of my classmates used what he learned as an architect-in-training and became a professional building contractor instead, essentially doing both designing and building his own designs himself.
I thought it was a brilliant career choice. It looked like way too much work to me although I saw the advantages.
Somehow I ended up getting out of architecture. Having learned a lot about using computers, I got into education so I taught for a while. Then my abilities expanded to include building and deploying desktop computers, servers and networks. These days I design experiences for users of digital products, from a career background that includes knowledge of web infrastructure, as well as knowledge of cognitive biases and perceptual processes.
Do most software companies understand that the roles of UX designer and UI designer are different? I’m not so sure about that. I’ve noticed the confusion and misunderstanding of the two distinctly different roles. They sound alike so people usually think that they are alike, and they assume that the job titles mean the same thing.
The UI designer normally doesn’t do the same kind of thinking and research that the UX designer does. Their respective expertise is useful at different stages of development of a web site or software development project.
Developing an understanding of color theory as well as cognitive neuroscience is useful in the field of UX design. Developing expertise in interface layout and front-end code functionality is mostly in the realm of UI designers. Finding the most elegant, enjoyable and effective ways to match how the human mind works with computer software, and using that connection to accomplish amazing things is the point of user experience design, or UX. It helps to master the visual and voice design tools of UI on the way.
“Design thinkers may be in short supply, but they exist inside every organization. The trick is spotting them, nurturing them, and freeing them to do what they do best.” - Tim Brown, author of “Change By Design”.
Every software company needs more than leading edge technology products. They need a UX design thinking culture in order to be truly successful.
By Jon Ross - UX Designer / UI Developer / Design Scientist
References:
The Difference Between UX and UI Design - A Layman’s Guide
- https://careerfoundry.com/en/blog/ux-design/the-difference-between-ux-and-ui-design-a-laymans-guide/
Software Development or User Experience Design: What Do You Really Need?
Software Development, Wikipedia
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_development
Wow. Thank you for bringing (new) words to my expertise. I am a design thinker in the area of education. I can create (or design) education solutions to challenges that people and organizations have. When phrases or ‘functions’ are coined they are brought to life then become useful to more than the person(s) utilizing it. Kudos to Tim Cook too!