What is UX/UI design
Whether you are pressing buttons on an arithmometer, turning the handle of a sharpening stone or swiping on a smartphone screen, these are all interfaces with which you interact with machines. And an interface doesn't have to be digital at all. It's just that the word ‘interface’ was borrowed from English quite recently and has only come to us in the digital age.
The goal of a UI/UX designer is to bring the user to some logical point in the interface. To make the user reach their goal.
What is UX/UI, in plain text
(there will be trite phrases in this section)
UX stands for User Experience (literally: ‘user experience’). That is, it is the experience/impressions a user gets from working with your interface. Whether they are able to achieve their goals and how easy or difficult it is to do so.
And UI is User Interface (literally ‘user interface’) - how the interface looks like and what physical characteristics it acquires. It determines what colour your ‘product’ will be, whether it will be comfortable for a person to put his finger on the buttons, whether the text will be readable and so on....
UX/UI design is the design of any user interfaces in which usability is as important as appearance.
What is UX and UI design, in other words
The UX/UI designer's direct responsibility is, for example, to ‘sell’ a product or service through an interface. It is on the basis of the UX/UI designer's work that the user makes the decision, ‘To be or not to be?’ To like or not to like. To buy or not to buy.
In fact, a designer's goals can be different. It is not necessary to ‘sell’ something. But I purposely don't want to use too abstract phrases, so that this text would be understandable to beginners; so that the style of presentation would not turn into a textbook on programming language of the 90s.
UX/UI design does not apply only to smartphones and websites. Moreover, the profession of UX/UI designer has existed since time immemorial. It's just that it wasn't called that before. To be more precise, it used to be called nothing at all, but was a part of other professions.
Here's the first example: when Wilhelm Schickard invented the arithmometer in 1623, he was already a UX/UI designer.
Because it was he who thought up which toggle switches and in what sequence a person should turn to get the result of calculations. And he also thought up the logical order in which they would be arranged. And in general, he thought up how all these knobs would look like. He created the interface for interaction with the machine.
Another older and more primitive example is the sharpening stone (wheel). Even in the early Middle Ages, there were many variations and mechanisms of such a wheel:
- it could be turned by hand with a crank
- the wheel could have been spun by someone else
- or you could pedal it with your foot without hands.
- And others...
So, when the inventor of the next sharpening stone thought:
- if he'll sit up and push the pedal himself.
- or he'll simplify the mechanism but have a slave spin the wheel by hand,
he was a UX designer at the time.
And the person who thought about how big the stone would be, what colour wood to choose for the stand and how to fasten the wooden poles together (nails or leather harnesses?) and how long the handle would be, was a UI designer.
And the way you would sharpen a sword would be called an interface.
The difference between UX and UI is that a UX designer plans how you will interact with the interface and what steps you need to take to do something. And a UI designer comes up with how each of those steps will look. As you can see from the examples above, UX and UI are so closely related that sometimes the line between the concepts is washed away. That's why both UX and UI are usually handled by one designer and his profession is spelled with a /.
Recently, the popularisation of the UX/UI designer profession is rather related to the development of digital technologies. But that very ‘boom’ (when we started to see the term ‘UX/UI’ in every second job advert) is related to the very name that someone came up with quite recently.
UI/UX design is now one of the most in-demand professions in the digital industry. How long it will be in demand depends on the development of this industry. And, to all appearances, it is only gaining momentum.
UX and UI are not trends. Technology is evolving. Demand for websites is growing. Digital applications are appearing like mushrooms. And design and development tools are becoming so simple that almost anyone without programming knowledge can make a business card site on their knees. But only this site must look somehow. And not just as an abstract framework of text and buttons. This is where programmers need the help of a UX/UI designer.
The division into web designers and UX/UI designers appeared with the development of the Internet. Over time, more narrow specialists were needed who would make interfaces specifically for websites.
Yes, UI/UX design is a broader and more capacious concept than web design.
P.S. Некоторые люди пишут UI/UX, но я предпочитаю писать UX/UI. И это только потому, что в рабочем процессе сначала делается UX, а потом UI. Но это не важно — пишите как хотите. Главное не путать этот порядок во время самого рабочего процесса. Потому что многие начинающие дизайнеры начинают сначала придумывать какие классные кнопки и фишки будут в их интерфейсе. Но не думают о том, как вообще пользователь будет переходить от одного шага к другому.
