What Differentiates User Experience and User Interface?

User Interface and User Experience differs from each other in many different ways. UI includes all the buttons and the icons that are used with the purpose of interacting with the device like screens, visual elements, or pages. User Experience, on other hand, is all about the internal experience that a person gains as they get to interact with all the aspects of a company’s products and services.

Differentiating User Interface from User Experience is extremely important, as UI, though a significant part of UX, has got its own identity and differs from UX in various elements. Understanding the difference between UI and UX with just the definition will not enlighten you with the exact details, let dig deep to understand the difference between UI and UX with the help of following points.

1. UX is more about solving a problem and UI works on the appearance and functioning of a product.

UX design helps in solving the problems of the users that affects their journey. Whether the problem is positive or negative, on the screen or off screen, UX looks into all of it and try resolving it. In contrast, UI works more on the appearance of the product, its surfaces, and its functioning.

2. UI creates emotional connections and UX aids the users to achieve their goals.

UX helps the user to identify what is important for them, what will be valuable for them, and what will match up their needs. Once the users identify their needs with the assistance of UX, they accomplish their goals successfully. On the other hand, it is important that users should make a personal connection with your site. Once they visit your site it is important to get retain them and that is made possible only with the help of UI as it creates an emotional connection with the User.

3. UX is a wide concept. UI is a narrow concept.

UX is focused on a lot of aspects. It focuses on the interfaces, products, and services. The importance of UX has been increasing as people now understand its value as it has proven to be useful in getting insights for the users so developers can analyze their hypotheses before they actually build the product. UI is only limited to user interfaces. Interfaces does not only limit itself to the graphical user interfaces of the tables, mobile phones, or computers, but it also includes the interfaces of various other products like washing and vending machines, watches, etc.

4. UI Design is conducted after UX Design.

The designing process is initiated with UX first as it undertakes the required research to decide on building a product or application. The research is conducted by the UX designers where they validate various product notions which ultimately helps in understanding how the development of the product will take place. After finalizing all iterations, the rest is left upon UI. UI then works on visual designs and micro interactions.

5. UI is limited to the visual and information designing over the screens, whereas UX is much more.

User Experience Design is about the complete experience a user gets while using a site. It is more about the journey of discovering about a company’s products, the actions taken by the users as they get to interact with the interface, the feelings when they try hard to accomplish their tasks, and also the impressions that they take with them after interacting with the site as a whole. On the other hand, UI is just focused on the designing of the visuals and the information on the screens. It basically includes designing the layout of digital product’s interface and the visual elements.