Because I found that there are still friends who came to ask me about the basic division of majors, I translated this popular science article.
User Interface (UI, User Interface) design is one of several interdisciplinary disciplines involved in designing software products, whether it is User Experience (UX, User Experience), Interaction Design (ID, Interaction Design) or Visual/Graphic Design (Visual / Graphic Design), can all involve user interface design.
1. What is User Interface Design?
Broadly speaking, the user interface is the medium of communication between humans and machines. The user sends an instruction to the machine, and the machine immediately starts a process, responds to information, and gives feedback. The user can make a decision on the next operation based on the user feedback.
Human-computer interaction (HCI, Human Computer Interaciton) is mainly concerned with digital interfaces, that is, punching machines in the past, command lines, and graphical interfaces (GUI, Graphic Design) today.
User interface design for digital products is mainly b2b data concerned with the layout, information structure, and display of interface elements on display screens and various terminal platforms, including video game and TV interfaces.
A Xerox 8010 information system from 1981 (Credit: DigiBarn, cropped)
User interface designers create designs that meet user needs based on design principles, rather than simply providing technical solutions. In this process, it is often necessary to balance user functional requirements and display effects (determined by brand positioning and visual design).
B2B Dashboard User Interface Design
Good user interface design utilizes a clear, unified visual hierarchy and content structure to guide users through tasks and reduce unnecessary content and elements.
A great user interface conveys information through real-world symbolic metaphors - such as: buttons, volume sliders, calendars, floppy-style save icons, and more.
The elements of the user interface mainly include:
Input: Allows users to make selections or enter information, including interactive components such as checkboxes, radio buttons, drop-down boxes, and text fields.
Navigation: Components for selecting destinations and filtering information, including drop-down menus, scroll bars, breadcrumbs, tabs, and pagination.
Information: Interactive elements that provide feedback to the user, including icons, text, media, progress bars, and prompts.
Image credit: Thrive
Effective designers refer to good design examples, design conventions, standards, and usability principles to ensure interface solutions meet user needs.
Among the most important design principles include:
Unified interface elements allow users to quickly familiarize themselves with and master the usage;
Clear element hierarchy and page structure allow users to see the most important content at a glance;
Use styles such as colors and fonts to indicate to the user the priority and role of elements;
Provide feedback when sending system status changes, errors, and user actions, so that users can understand the process and make next-step decisions;
Understand user preferences and demand priorities to make the operation process smoother and more natural;
Use white space and reasonable layout to make the interface clearer and easier to understand.
Plant watering app, image credit: Tubik
The difference between user interface design and experience design
It’s easy to confuse user interface design and user experience design. Although the two overlap, they each have very different skill requirements.
User experience design focuses on the overall structure and function of the product, as well as the user experience. Compared with interface designers, experience designers focus on organizing content through information architecture and making solution decisions through user research, task testing, and business analysis.
Take the account creation and ordering process of e-commerce as an example: Experience designers use methods such as user flow, experience maps, low-fidelity wireframes, and interactive prototypes, and use user testing to validate and optimize design concepts.
Apple Watch prototype animation, image credit: Alex Dovhyi
Third, the comparison of user interface design and experience design
Interfaces aren’t the real solution to a product, and interface design is often a big part of an experience designer’s job, but it’s not the whole story. You can understand it this way: if the user experience is a consumable, then the user interface is a tool (a tool that uses the consumable).
User experience design is a multi-step design strategy process whose goal is to create products that are attractive, easy to use, and easy to understand. Through the process of UX design, we can get the right user interface solution.
User Experience (UX) vs User Experience (UI) Image Credit: Shane Rounce
4. What does a user interface designer do?
User interface designers create product interface solutions that are closer to the final form on the basis of wireframes provided by user experience designers. They need to follow the information hierarchy and priorities expressed by the experience wireframes, and apply logically unified visual and interaction rules to the entire product.
E-commerce interface concept design, image source: Remco Bakker
The responsibilities of a user interface designer include visual hierarchy, composition, spacing, visual weight for alignment, headings, and text, rules for using components (buttons, forms, etc.), as well as color specifications and logos.
Since more and more user interfaces today involve dynamic interactions and transitions, not just simple static pages, interface designers will also need to work with motion and interaction designers to optimize the basics provided by user experience designers. Interaction concept.
User interface design also includes the work of data visualization and information design, which can help users quickly understand complex data through simple information presentation.
Jewelry e-commerce concept design, image source: Tubik
The user interface designer provides the final high-fidelity prototype of the page to the program developer. As mentioned above, the user interface design sometimes overlaps with the user experience design. In fact, it can also involve front-end development, especially in the establishment of front-end component libraries, and page templates.