September 15, 2020 By UxDT admin

User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) are two terms often used interchangeably. Have you ever wondered, “What is UI, what is UX, and what’s the difference between them?”.

Commonly speaking the User Interface (UI) is the series of screens, pages, and visual elements like buttons and icons that enable a person to interact with a product or service. On the other hand, User Experience (UX) is the internal experience that a person has as they interact with every aspect of a company’s products and services. Good and bad user experience design is determined by how easy or difficult it is to interact with each element or aspect of a product or service.

Cognitive scientist Don Norman coined the term “user experience” in the early 1990s and defined it as  “User experience encompasses all aspects of the end-users interaction with the company, its services, and its products”.

At the most basic level, UI is made up of all the elements that enable someone to interact with a product or service. UX, on the other hand, is what the individual interacting with that product or service takes away from the entire experience.

UI design is focused on how the product’s surfaces look and function. UX design is focused on anything that affects the user’s journey to solve that problem, positive or negative, both on-screen and off. The user interface is only a piece of that journey.

The UI tends to be the specifics of screens, focusing on labels, visual style, guidelines, and structure. The UX focuses on the user and their journey through the product.