Business owners know the importance of having a good user interface for their site, but they often neglect to consider how important UX is.
If you are wondering whether to prioritize UI or UX, you should know that both play a role in making your website more user-friendly.
The two terms may seem interchangeable or like you can just use one and not the other, but that’s not necessarily true. What exactly do these two design aspects mean and why is it important for business owners to understand them both?
In this post, we will discuss the difference between UX and UI design. We’ll talk about what each is responsible for in a project and how both jobs are important to the success of your business.
Table of Contents
What Is UX and What Does It Do for Your Company?
UX stands for user experience, and it’s the overall design of your product. With UX in mind, you will be able to create a website that has great flow between pages; one where someone will be able to easily navigate throughout the site without much thought or hesitation.
Perhaps the best way to explain UX is the way someone feels about their experience with your product.
The easier it is to navigate, the quicker your customers are able to accomplish their goals, and even just how much fun it is using your product will affect UX.
For example, you’ll want to think of things like:
How long does it take someone to figure out how to use or navigate through your website? Is there a short learning curve before people are able to accomplish what they want on your site? Do you have consistency throughout similar pages?
Or does each page look completely different from the last one which makes them hard for users to differentiate between different areas of the site? These are important questions that should be thought about when creating UX.
UI stands for the user interface. You might have heard of this term in the context of macOS, iOS, Android, or Windows Phone apps. UI is the frontend design for an app or program.
Sure enough, users can’t see it directly when they use your product but UI has a direct effect on how well your business runs.
It also includes what happens behind the scenes to allow customers to successfully navigate through your web pages and products. UI deals with the following components:
Navigation. The way people get from point A to point B in a UI should be easily recognizable and intuitive, so they feel comfortable going through your site or app.
Colors This is another important aspect that even small business owners should pay attention to because colors have psychological effects on users and influence their behavior towards your product. For example, blue may be associated with sky and water by a lot of people, leading them to think about freedom when coming across it; while red can make customers associate your brand with warmth and care, which means you need to adjust the shade since every color means something different psychologically.
Icons and images. There are well-designed icons (pictograms) such as the Facebook “like” icon that have an immediate association with their default meaning, making them easy to understand and use.
Feedback. Customers need to know when they are doing right or wrong in your UI so they can correct themselves. For example, if someone wants to log into a website but lacks the required parameters, he/she should have instant feedback about it so they can keep trying.
UI is crucial for user experience because it gives visual cues about how users navigate through your website or product.
It helps people get acquainted with what you do and how you operate easily within minutes.
A good UI also makes your company stand out from competitors because of its compelling design that tells potential customers what you do and how you operate.
The Difference Between UX and UI
It’s common for some web designers to think of UX and UI as one thing because it’s hard to separate the two.
But there are some differences between UX vs UI that you should know about.
Firstly, both deal with how users engage your product or website, which is why UX/UI design is often referred to as a single term even though they are very different things.
It is also more common for people who design software products to focus on UX aspects while companies providing more traditional services may focus on UI aspects of their business.
However, this doesn’t mean you can ignore either aspect of user experience or user interface when designing your company’s web presence because doing so will cause at least one major problem down the line: user frustration.
For example, if you have a great idea but can’t communicate it properly to your customers or there is something preventing them from navigating through their desired content due to poor UI design, then they will leave your website because it’s not user-friendly.
In addition, paying less attention to the way a user interacts with a product and more attention to the visual appearance of the product has been proven to be “bad for business” as well.
Why? Because people nowadays want things done quickly and don’t have time to waste on poorly designed websites that may take forever just to load up properly.
Secondly, UI deals with how users interact with your site or app which includes colors, buttons icons, and other elements that influence navigation while UX is about how effective your UI is when it comes to helping users achieve their goals.
Keep in mind that the terms are not interchangeable, but complementary when talking about user experience and user interface design.
However, they can be separated into different functions when analyzing a specific example of UI or UX.
For instance, you can focus on each aspect in detail in order to improve website navigation in the case of faulty UI design by making sure there’s no way for customers to get lost when using your product or service so they don’t leave due to frustration.
On the other hand, if you notice there’s something wrong with the overall interface design (for example, colors) then it would be best to let someone who has expertise in web design know about the issue so it can be addressed.
Now that you know the difference between UI and UX as well as how they work together, it’s time to learn when each aspect should be addressed.
In general, UI should come first because, without proper visual elements such as images and colors, there is no way for users to tell if a product or website actually does what it’s supposed to.
In addition, companies that provide products or services will usually focus on the user interface before anything else since their goal is to make sure customers can navigate through their websites easily in order to understand what they do.
On the other hand, businesses who want customers to better understand what they do but don’t plan on selling anything online may end up focusing most of their attention on user experience design rather than user interface design in order to make their product more appealing and easy to use in the long run.
With that said, the emphasis here is on how both user experience and user interface design are critical for businesses who want to be successful online since they work together rather than being two separate entities that can’t get along with one another.
In addition, you should pay attention to UX vs UI whenever your goal is getting customers from a specific business niche such as real estate or healthcare because not all people have the same preferences when it comes to the visual appearance of websites, apps, and other products so it’s important for entrepreneurs to take this into consideration whenever they launch a new site or product line.
How to Find out Which Is Best for Your Business
To determine which aspect should be given more emphasis, one must first take a look at their specific business niche or market to see what customers expect from the products they buy.
For instance, if you’re selling clothes online then you have to know that most people are interested in how things look rather than the user interface since the visual element of clothing is something that matters when making a purchasing decision.
On the other hand, there are businesses that will appeal to consumers based on what they do rather than how something looks because this group of customers cares more about things like speed and convenience which is where UX design can come into play.
That said, companies dealing with both types of users need to make sure they pay attention to user interface design (UI) when it comes to making their online presence appealing while also focusing on user experience (UX).
How Can a Poor User Experience Impact a Business’ Success Rate?
When a user is unsatisfied with a given product or service, the first thing they’ll usually do after visiting your business website is left and never come back which potentially means that you may lose sales from that customer.
In addition, inefficient design can also result in lower conversion rates as well as high bounce rates for any given company’s website since it can lead customers to give up trying to find out more about your products and services.
In other words, having a poor UX design for certain websites will not only hurt online businesses but their clients as well because people won’t have an enjoyable time when looking for information on the site so they’ll probably go elsewhere since this leads them to waste time and effort rather than getting what they want.
Conclusion
In a nutshell, both user experience and user interface design are important for online business owners to take into consideration since they work together rather than being two separate entities that can’t get along with one another.
With that said, the emphasis here is on how both UX and UI are critical for businesses who want to be successful online since they work together rather than being two separate entities that can’t get along with one another.
However, it’s important for entrepreneurs to take this into consideration whenever their goal is getting customers from a specific market or business niche like real estate or healthcare because not all people have the same preferences when it comes to the visual appearance of websites, apps, and other products so it’s important for entrepreneurs to pay attention to UX vs UI whenever they launch a new site or product line.
Acodez is one of the best UX design agencies in India. The latest technology trends of website design are followed to provide the clients with the best web services to provide a better UX design experience to the users. This, in turn, has helped the organizations get better returns on their investment.
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Rajeesh P.K. is the Director and Creative Head at Acodez . With an experience of 10+ years in UX Design & User Interface Design, when coupled with his expert coding skills in HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript, makes him one of the top UX Architects in India, with more than 15 international awards to his credit.
