At the most basic level, the user interface (UI) is the series of screens, pages, and

visual elements—like buttons and icons—that enable a person to interact with a

product or service.

User experience (UX), on the other hand, is the internal experience that a person
has as they interact with every aspect of a company’s products and services.

It’s common for folks to use these terms interchangeably, or sometimes incorrectly. If
you’ve ever wondered, “What is UI, what is UX, and what’s the difference between
them?” today we’ll dig a bit deeper into UI and UX to get a better understanding of
the differences between them.

Contents

 What is UI?
 What is UX?
 What’s the difference between UI and UX?
 UI/UX experts weigh in

What is UI?
Simply put, user interface (UI) is anything a user may interact with to use a digital
product or service. This includes everything from screens and touchscreens,
keyboards, sounds, and even lights. To understand the evolution of UI, however, it’s
helpful to learn a bit more about its history and how it has evolved into best practices
and a profession.

A brief history of the user interface

Back in the 1970’s, if you wanted to use a computer, you had to use the command
line interface. The graphical interfaces used today didn’t yet exist commercially. For
a computer to work, users needed to communicate via programming language,
requiring seemingly infinite lines of code to complete a simple task.

By the 1980’s the first graphical user interface (GUI) was developed by computer
scientists at Xerox PARC. With this groundbreaking innovation, users could now
interact with their personal computers by visually submitting commands through
icons, buttons, menus, and checkboxes.

This shift in technology meant that anyone could use a computer, no coding
required, and the personal computer revolution began.

By 1984 Apple Computer released the Macintosh personal computer which included
a point and click mouse. The Macintosh was the first commercially successful home
computer to use this type of interface.
The accessibility and prevalence of personal—and office—computers meant that
interfaces needed to be designed with users in mind. If users couldn’t interact with
their computers, they wouldn’t sell. As a result, the UI designer was born.

As with any growing technology, the UI designer’s role has evolved as systems,
preferences, expectations, and accessibility has demanded more and more from
devices. Now UI designers work not just on computer interfaces, but mobile phones,
augmented and virtual reality, and even “invisible” or screenless interfaces (also
referred to as zero UI) like voice, gesture, and light.

Today’s UI designer has nearly limitless opportunities to work on websites, mobile

apps, wearable technology, and smart home devices, just to name a few. As long as
computers continue to be a part of daily life, there will be the need to make the
interfaces that enable users of all ages, backgrounds, and technical experience can
effectively use.

What is UX?
User experience, or UX, evolved as a result of the improvements to UI. Once there
was something for users to interact with, their experience, whether positive,
negative, or neutral, changed how users felt about those interactions.
Cognitive scientist Don Norman is credited with coining the term, “user experience”
back in the early 1990’s when he worked at Apple and defines it as follows,

‘User experience’ encompasses all aspects of the end-user’s interaction with

the company, its services, and its products.

That’s a broad definition that could encompass every possible interaction a person
could have with a product or service—not just a digital experience. Some UX
professionals have opted for calling the field customer experience, and others have
gone a step further to simply refer to the field as experience design.

No matter what it’s called, Norman’s original definition of UX is at the core of every
thought experience design—it’s all-encompassing and always centered around the
human being it's interacting with.

To understand what makes an experience a good one, Peter Moreville developed a

great visual to highlight what goes into effective UX design.

This ‘usability honeycomb’ has become the foundation for best practices for UX
professionals to help guide their efforts across multiple touchpoints with the user,
including:

 How they would discover your company’s product

 The sequence of actions they take as they interact with the interface
  The thoughts and feelings that arise as they try to accomplish their
task
 The impressions they take away from the interaction as a whole

UX designers are responsible for ensuring that the company delivers a product or
service that meets the needs of the customer and allows them to seamlessly achieve
their desired outcome.

UX designers work closely with UI designers, UX researchers, marketers, and

product teams to understand their users through research and experimentation.
They use the insights gained to continually iterate and improve experiences, based
on both quantitative and qualitative user research.

What's the difference between UI and UX?

At the most basic level, UI is made up of all the elements that enable someone to
interact with a product or service. UX, on the other hand, is what the individual
interacting with that product or service takes away from the entire experience.

Don Norman and Jakob Nielsen summed it up nicely when they said:

It’s important to distinguish the total user experience from the user interface
(UI), even though the UI is obviously an extremely important part of the design.
As an example, consider a website with movie reviews. Even if the UI for
finding a film is perfect, the UX will be poor for a user who wants information
about a small independent release if the underlying database only contains
movies from the major studios.

Take Google, for example. Its famously spartan interface highlights how a great
experience doesn’t require bells and whistles. By focusing on the user, Google
knows that when they come to the site, they’re after one thing: information. And they
want it quickly.

The fact that ‘google’ is a widely accepted verb shows how well the company
delivers on that experience—and expectation. Just about anything a person has ever
wanted to know can be accessed in the blink of an eye and few other search engines
survive today.

Now imagine that every time you searched on Google, it took 15 seconds to get a
result—you’d no longer be able to instantly get an answer to your question. Even if
the interface stayed the same, your experience with Google would be dramatically
different.

UI/UX experts weigh in

Not surprisingly, different people have different takes on this topic. So we reached
out to some smart and talented folks from the tech industry to get their opinion.
Here’s what they had to say about the difference between UI and UX:

1. UX is focused on the user’s journey to solve a problem, UI is focused on

how a product’s surfaces look and function

Ken Norton Partner at Google Ventures, former Product Manager at Google

“Start with a problem we’d like to solve. UX design is focused on anything that
affects the user’s journey to solve that problem, positive or negative, both on-screen
and off. UI design is focused on how the product’s surfaces look and function. The
user interface is only piece of that journey. I like the restaurant analogy I’ve heard
others use: UI is the table, chair, plate, glass, and utensils. UX is everything from the
food, to the service, parking, lighting and music.”

2. A UX designer is concerned with the conceptual aspects of the design

process, leaving the UI designer to focus on the more tangible elements

Andy Budd Co-founder of Clearleft, Founder of UX London

Often the words used to describe a discipline end up being divorced from their
original meanings. For instance architect literally means “head mason” and plumber
means “lead worker.” Two names which clearly no longer articulate or explain what
that profession does.

In a professional context “User Experience Designer” has a specific meaning and set
of skills, based on a community of practice reaching back over 20 years. In this
world, a User Experience Designer is concerned with the conceptual aspects of the
design process, leaving the UI designer to focus on the more tangible elements.