In this segment, we're going to look at the different roles involved in producing UI/UX. A simple division would be to look at it in terms of a front end and a back end of the process. The front end is much more visible to the user and involves interface design. It's the thing that the user is going to see on the screen, whereas the back end is much more invisible, and it's hidden from the user. And that involves the programming, the coding, the functionality of the site. Outside of these two main areas are another two that are very important. Ideation deals with coming up with an idea, figuring out how your website is going to work, what its goals are, and testing deals with getting feedback from an audience at an early stage, which might shape both the programming, and the interface design as well as the ideation. These four areas together provide the core for developing UI/UX. Front end design could easily be equated to UI design, where you're really dealing with graphic elements, and looking at the interface itself, building design assets. The back end could be looked at as coding, or programming, which obviously involves a totally different skill set. Testing might be the area more where your UX is involved, where you're planning, mapping things out, and getting feedback from a user. But the truth is, that this compartmentalization of these four different areas isn't a realistic representation of how they really work. In truth, they have a great deal more exchange between each other, even especially at the early stages of development. Especially at the early stages of thinking about what a web site or what an app might be, these four key areas bounce ideas around between each other as things get developed and defined. So there's a process of testing that goes on between coding something, coming up with ideas, building the visual interface itself, and trying it out with the user. These four areas can be key in developing a digital experience, but then once it's developed, it's going to need to be further tested with an exterior audience in a finished state. But it's also going to need some kind of marketing and promotion. So these are other areas that are connected to the process of building UI/UX. And while they sit outside these core areas, they're also very important. Another two areas that sit outside the core, are the areas of production and content development. And these normally happen in the middle stages of the process of developing a website or an app. For instance, where you need to get assets, and you need to maybe produce hundreds of different screens, or hundreds of different pieces of artwork. And even when all of these things, all of these jobs are put together, and you've actually made an app or a website that's out in the world and functioning, there's also a certain amount of upkeep and updates that might involve all of these different people every time something has to change on a site or an app. So we talked about these areas not really being compartmentalized, but interacting with each other and informing each other. You could also think about where do you want to fit, what kind of role do you want to have in the UI/UX process in developing web or developing apps for example. You could decide that as a UX designer, you're really interested in mapping, and planning, and figuring out the interaction of a piece of content of a website for instance. But you might also really enjoy working with an audience and testing it, getting feedback and implementing that feedback. Or you could decide that you're much more interested in coming up with ideas for a website or an app. And those ideas might all be based around coding for example. They might be driven by technical skills. So you can see how these two areas don't have to operate separately. You don't have to be pigeonholed into just one of these. You can actually work in two or three of them at the same time. And what that does is, it starts to play to whatever your strongest skill set is. So you might decide that you like doing UI design, based much more in coding, which would be slightly different than just working with coming up with ideas that are based in coding. You'd have to have graphic design skills, and programming skills. Some people manage to do all of these things, and that's quite rare these days. Especially as websites and apps have accelerated to the point of needing immediate, a lot of upkeep, and updates having to have immediate response to problems. When the web first started for instance, one person could do all of these roles. In the mid 1990s for instance, I might be designing a website, where I would be writing the content, taking the photographs, designing the interface, doing all of the programming, and all of the testing, as well as perhaps even hosting the site on my own server. Nowadays, that's a little more rare mostly because of the scale of a lot of commercial enterprises to do with web and apps where you might be working. They have a much larger audience, and everything has to happen much faster. So it's very difficult for just one person to do that. In this first course, we're really going to focus on UI design, and the role that that plays within the larger set of jobs. And you might decide that you're a UI designer, that also wants to focus on one of these other areas or perhaps two or three of these other areas and combine them. But for the sake of this course, we're really going to focus on UI design to begin with. And even though, we're going to touch on some of these other areas because ultimately all connected to each other, we're mostly going to look at the interface itself, and the design problems associated with that interface.
