UI Design in a Nutshell
First things first—what is UI design?
User Interface Design is a crucial subset of UX. They both share the same end goal—to provide a positive experience for the user—but UI Design comprises an entirely separate leg of the journey.
Put simply, UI is what you use to interact with a product, while UX is concerned with how this overall interaction feels. We’ve already written extensively about the differences between user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) design, so from now on we’ll focus solely on UI.
UI Design: The Visual Aspect
UI design focuses on the user’s visual experience. It determines how a user interacts with an interface—be it an app, a video game or a website. It’s all about how the user navigates from A to B via different visual touch points. Think tapping a button or swiping through pictures.
The job of a UI designer is to design all the screens through which a user will move and to create the visual elements—and their interactive properties—that facilitate this movement.
UI Design: The Human Aspect
At the same time, a UI designer works with human behavior in mind.
How so?
Look at it this way. A good interface requires barely any thought from the user. Consider your favorite app: it’s easy on the eye and simple to use, right? When you first installed it, you didn’t spend ages working out how to get from A to B—it was just obvious.
The UI designer is pivotal to this. They think about the human user and how the mind works. They use things like patterns, spacing, and color to guide the user.
“Intuitive” is the keyword here. Not only is the UI designer a creative creature; they also put themselves in the user’s shoes, anticipating what they expect at each stage. They then use this empathy to design visual, interactive elements that respond in a way that feels natural to the user.
Let’s say you’re using an app to look for a new apartment. One listing, in particular, catches your eye, so you click to view the gallery. A full-size image takes over your screen, captioned 1/5. You know there are more pictures, so you use your finger to swipe through the gallery. There were no instructions to do so—somehow, you just knew.
This is the work of the UI designer. They think about what the user will expect, and design the app’s interface accordingly.
In a nutshell: UX draws out the map, the bare bones. UI then fleshes them out with visual, interactive touch points that take the user through their journey as intuitively as possible. Want to take it one step further? Learn about Zero UI, which moves UI design away from graphic interfaces and into the future.