What are the differences between UI/UX and front-end development?

Question

front-end developer here.

I'm working in a tiny startup: one back-end developer and me as the front-end developer. My boss is calling me UX boy since I've worked there, even if I don't specially consider myself as a UX designer. I admit that I discover this term on Hacker News since a quite short period. I'm feeling concerned by it.

However, as I am supposed to deal with graphics design and front-end code (what I consider as the UI in a traditional way), plus workflow, ergonomics and the User eXperience on another side, I'm asking myself if I don't miss something special. I'm used to work in very small teams and have to do all by myself.

The boss seems to have great expectations in UI/UX, and maybe this term gives him some fantasy about our work. We work in france and as I say, this term is quite new here, and I think people don't always use it in it's right meaning. The stuff is trendy, and it's cool to say that the staff is doing UI/UX even if it's meaningless or even worse, false. And what does it mean doing UI/UX? When you work on an interface you HAVE to take care of the users and their experience. I can't believe a great professional wouldn't.

I come from art and graphic design. Then, I learn programming and start to hack gently. I've always considering that this way was right and believe that every small team front-end developper have to deal with UX, and will not just implement what the UX guy has build for him. I don't believe it works that way in most of the small teams, but I believe it does in larger one.

Answer 1

This is not the definite answer, but perhaps you can try to think of the difference between UI/UX and front-end development as the difference between design and implementation. The problem is that UX designers tend to come from either a graphic design or software development background, and so there are naturally overlaps between their role and that of a 'web designer/developer'. I would think that someone who is a UX specialist looks more at the human side of the design process, and would tend to do research and ask questions that will form the basis for coming up with design concepts/ideas, and then also doing user testing and evaluation to validate these ideas post development (or as part of the development cycle).

If you really want to cut through all the jargon and terminology, UX is really just a philosophy/concept/approach, depending on how much you believe it needs to be in concrete or is subject to intrepretation. But in principle if you think more like a user (i.e. from a user-centric, goal driven perspective) rather than a developer (i.e. from a functional, specification/implementation perspective) then you are on a good path to becoming a UX practitioner. This is what they refer to as the user-centric approach to design and development. In comparison, UI is a little less abstract because it deals directly with the user interface aspect, and although it can be as high level as creating design patterns and libraries, you can also get down to specific details like individual UI components and elements.

I am happy to answer more specific questions, but the thing about hype is that people will get over it soon enough and face reality.

Answer 2

A metaphor I sometimes use is the difference between an architect and a construction foreman, working to build a building.

A foreman can build a building herself--she's built buildings before, she knows generally what goes where, and she knows how to actually put screws and nails and wood and plaster together to form a structure.

However, the foreman has not studied how buildings ought to be created. An experienced foreman will rely on things like municipal building codes ("design patterns") to guide construction, but the end result may end up hard to use or unattractive. You often see this in discount repair jobs--for example, a bathroom where the door collides with the sink, or a cheaply subdivided house where there are rooms that feel awkward and hard to use. These were solutions that were easy to build, and they may be built very well, but somehow they don't hang together.

Conversely, an architect is trained in understanding spaces, how people will use the building, how they will move through it, how lighting and ceiling height and door placement and room organization all work together to make a pleasant place to live. They may not have the ability to plaster a wall or drive a nail, however, and as a result their more adventurous designs may be challenging to bring to the real world.

As a front-end developer, you're the foreman and construction crew all rolled into one, but you might not be an architect (yet). You may not have the training about how to design the software for the best User Experience. You can draw on examples from the world around you to produce functional apps, but it may not be sufficient to produce usable apps.

The good news is that you can learn UX techniques that will help you to understand user needs, to create designs that meet those needs, and to test those designs with real live users to verify.

Answer 3

User Experience is something that many people claim to do but few do it well, the reason there is so much work out there for people who only do user experience (and are not visual designers and/or front end coders). Usually the larger the project the higher the need to have a dedicated user experience person / team.

It's much like constructing a building. If you're doing a shed then one person can do everything but as the building gets larger you need dedicate people.

There is a very good reason why on many projects the people who engineer the final result are not the people who design the solutions and set functionality. This because often the best user experience solution is technically complicated and it is human nature to try and find simpler solutions if you are responsible for building the solution. This is why it can be an advantage (against the advise of others) to not be a coder and a UX person. They are different mindsets and will conflict against each other.

This is also true for UX design and visual design. Although good visual designers will also have some good interaction design skills deciding what needs to be communicated to the users can lead to complex visual design problems and some visual designers may choose to add/remove items for visual reasons and not for usability/user experience reasons. In some ways the visual design mindset can be similar to the engineering mindset as it is much closer to the final implementation than the user experience design.

UX is a broad skill set that involves things like user research, information architecture, content strategy, task analysis and bunch of other things. Interface design is part of UX and I have worked on several project where I never got down to screen level designs but worked on research or defining the overall concept and functionality of a system, for example defining how ratings and reviews will work for a large UK retailer.

Answer 4

UX Design consigns to the term User Experience Design, while UI Design is acronym for User Interface Design. Both elements are vital to a product and work closely together. But in spite of their professional relationship, the roles themselves are quite dissimilar, referring to very dissimilar divisions of the process and the design discipline.

Where UX Design is a more analytical and technical field, UI Design is quicker to what we refer to as graphic design, though the responsibilities are rather more intricate.

User experience design (UXD or UED) is the procedure of enhancing customer contentment and loyalty by convalescing the usability, ease of use, and delight provided in the interaction between the customer and the product. A UI (User Interface) designer is tasked with the development of the segment of the program that a user encounters. Although this can range from hardware keys or text interfaces, the most familiar nowadays is the graphical user interface or GUI.

A web designer, on the other hand, needs to be taught a wide set of skills in order to create a completely functional web site. At the very barest, a web designer only needs to learn HTML to generate very simple pages but this kind of site is very insufficient.

Answer 5

This question is quite confusing as every organisation has different requirements. Companies are combining UX and UI into a one person job.

I believe UX is in the same area as a Business Analyst or Graphic Designer role as these positions take care of usability, accessiablity and the look and feel of the application. UI, on the other hand, is more of a combination of Web Designer and Developer. This means the Designer working in HTML and CSS where as the Developer works on in languages like JavaScript, .net, PHP and Java.

I prefer to split UI in two levels UI Designer(combination with UX and basic level of JS) and UI Developer (More of a full stack developer who focuses in Object Oriented Programming).