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Difference Between UI, UX, and Web Designer

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Natalia Jane
Difference Between UI, UX, and Web Designer

The field of design has grown so incredibly in the past that the term designer has become vague. Today, we hear terms like UI designers, UX designers, and Web designers which seem to be very confusing. These three terms are often used interchangeably and also has a lot of overlap between them. So to someone outside the design field, these might all sound the same. But in reality, they are all different areas with different roles. Let’s try and understand these fields in some depth.

What is a UX Designer?

A UX designer is someone who focuses on the experience of a user when they interact with a product/service. It requires having an understanding of users, their needs, behaviour, etc. To achieve this, they use several strategies such as user research, analytics, creating personas, wireframing, prototyping, and testing.

The role of a UX designer extends to the development phase, testing phase, and marketing phase. Soft skills such as communication and empathy are important for a UX designer as they work closely with people throughout a design process. A UX designer needs social, analytical, cognitive, and psychological skills. They have to be constantly connected to the needs of the people and adapt their designs accordingly.

What is a UI Designer?

A UI designer is the one who creates the visual design of a product/service. They work on the input provided by UX designers and create an interface. They focus on the aesthetics and presentation of the design to ensure a seamless interaction for users. When we look from a perspective of UI vs UX, we can see that unlike UX design, UI design is a completely digital approach.

UI designers require some coding skills as well as knowledge about front end development. While designing their focus is on visual components on the interface such as buttons, scrollbars, colour scheme, typography, and such. That is, they are concerned with the components that users directly interact with. They design visual touchpoints and create a skeleton for user navigation. Responsive design, visual hierarchy, and interactive response- all this comes under the discipline of UI designers.

What is a Web Designer?

The role of a web designer is to work on all the inputs from the UI designer and UX designer to create a functional website that users can access on web browsers and mobile browsers. A web designer might not think about users’ needs. Instead, their focus would be on creating an aesthetic layout for a website that is functional and practical.

A web designer requires in-depth knowledge about programming languages such as HTML and CSS and design software such as Photoshop and Illustrator. They focus on areas like icon development, drop-down menus, digital slideshows, etc. Web designers focus more on visual designing and engineering than following a human-oriented method. Web design is a less iterative process as compared to UX design.

Conclusion

The line dividing the three branches is a very fine one. But, as we saw, all three branches are connected to each other and might often overlap on account of their dependent relationship. Basically, UX design is about how a design works, UI design is about how a design looks, and Web design is about putting together an efficient website for users to interact. A web designer need not become a good UI UX designer, but in practice, a web designer is often a UI designer, UX designer, and a programmer all included in one. If web design is a river, UI and UX design are two streams that flow into the river.

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Natalia Jane
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