• Why UX and UI should remain separate
  • By Daryl Duckmanton
  • The Nuggets translation Project
  • Permanent link to this article: github.com/xitu/gold-m…
  • Translator: Mirosalva
  • Proofreader: HearFishle, Shixi-Li

Most of us have probably heard the term user experience, and we’ve all heard the term user interface. Did you know that user experience is not the same as user interface? But why do I often see a pitch about the UX/UI designer role? It’s like they’re in the same type of job. It’s not, and here’s why.

First and foremost, a user designer is primarily concerned with the users of your product or service, both as consumers and as stakeholders within your business. At a high level, the ultimate goal of a designer is to create what your product or service is required to do: to provide maximum value to your target audience. With this in mind, some user designers need to do the following (an incomplete list) :

  1. Develop strategy – conduct research, interview prospects, establish business objectives, identify customer needs, build a strategic roadmap, etc.
  2. Scope – Create a list of requirements that meet your prospects’ goals and your business goals and that are highly feasible.
  3. Structuring – Establish a simple but effective information architecture pattern that forms an interaction and/or flow between specific steps of a product or service.
  4. Architecture – high-level interface design (Mocks, etc.), navigation design, etc.
  5. Image – Visual representation of the final output of a product or service. Focusing on how the eye is guided on various screens often helps designers understand how content flows through the design.

You can see that only the last one focuses on design, and not just visualizing the information architecture and application interaction flow through design. So in conclusion, a UX designer doesn’t necessarily have design skills, or the creativity to design systems and make them look good. Even if they have the ability, they have a lot of work to do to make sure that the product or service is constructed in a way that the customer needs.

I personally see the designer role as a separate role. Why is that? So let’s take a look at some of the things they do (again, an incomplete list) :

  1. User Interface Design – Use different shapes to create creative and engaging user interfaces. These shapes may correspond to different devices, such as iPhone, iPad, Android, or just web apps with different screen sizes. In most cases, both are present.
  2. Theme design – Related to # 1. Provide a coherent theme and design a product or service that will be memorable to users.
  3. Logo Design – Create any Logo that a product or service may need. Each logo may have some different shape characteristics.
  4. Digital asset creation – Depending on user interface design, resources need to be designed to be used by developers. Some interfaces need to indicate certain state changes that a button or other element can produce, and these state changes need to be reliably derived.
  5. Web Design (Optional) – If the product or service is a Web application, some designers will continue to do some basic prototyping of the look and feel of the Web application without back-end support. This assists user experience designers in making decisions about whether their assumptions actually match the expectations of the product or service before development has even begun.

Now forgive me, if you’re reading this as a UX designer or UI designer, and I’m just a developer, I don’t fully understand everything either character does, and I’m sure they do a lot more than this article describes. However, the point I want to make in this article is to elaborate that the two are completely different and need to be treated differently.

I’ve seen many companies hire only one UX/UI designer. I’ve noticed that these individuals are overworked and don’t have enough time to do everything exactly that needs to be done, or even worse, they’re simple UI designers who can only do a little UX design. Of course you can say that’s fine, but for me, ux is everything about a product or service, and it’s a full-time job in and of itself.

It’s important to me that the UX designer role is separate from that of the UI designer, and if I can afford it, I’ll hire at least two UX designers for every project that needs UX, and that’s how valuable it is to me. In fact, if I were to start a business project based on a product or service tomorrow and could only choose one employee to accompany me, I would choose a UX designer over any other role. I don’t think many people understand how important a UX designer is to a business project based on a product or service. If you don’t have a deep understanding of what you need to do to get the most out of your product or service, you’re likely to fail no matter how good it looks or momentum.

Keep UX designers and UI designers separate. Both are too important to merge to try to save money. I guarantee it’s worth investing in the two types of jobs separately.

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