In this segment, we're going to look at the relationship between UI and UX. We often conflate these two terms. But to begin with, we're going to pull them apart in order to examine them separately, so we can understand the differences between the two. UI is often a term that's used to talk about the interface itself. It's about how it looks. It's about visual design, and how we access digital content. UX is a little bit more about how that digital content feels, what the experience of it is. And that is often rooted much more in a non-visual design practice. It's important to understand these two practices as being different, because they often appeal to different kinds of people who do different kinds of jobs. Visual design is much more rooted in graphic design, for example, a non-visual design might involve much more research, and planning, and testing. So the UI designer is really looking at the interface itself, and the UX designer is often focusing much more on the experience of the user. If we break these roles down further, we can see how they might suit different kinds of people doing different kinds of work. A user interface designer might be focusing more on form and aesthetics, on the look and feel and the organization of the information, whereas a UX designer might concentrate much more also on how the interface feels, but on the navigation and the structure and the story of the whole site or app. In a lot of ways the UI designer is looking at the surface of visual identity, and that's often design driven. So it suits someone that often has more graphic design or visual skills, whereas the UX designer is looking at content, how to get the user engaged with that content, and this work is often driven by the user's experience and by feedback from the user. So UX can be seen as being much more user driven, and UI being much more design driven. But of course these two things overlap. We talk about a UI/UX designer as somebody who does both of these things, but in truth a UI designer it tends to focus more on UI with a little bit of UX, an UX designer tends to focus more on UX with a little bit of UI. A simple way to think about this is that UI is design driven, and UX is user driven. And while there are some people that can work with both of these things equally well and occupy the space in the middle, and be a UI/UX designer, this is a little bit less common. As we mentioned, UI deals with visual design and that's very tangible and physical. You're often making an actual interface using digital tools like Photoshop and Illustrator, whereas the UX designer is quite often making something more propositional. They're trying to create an experience that often doesn't really exist. So they have to map, and plan, and figure out what that experience is without it being tangible. So when we look at this diagram, we can see the UI and UX are really separate professions, but we've put them together into one profession. And you could think about this diagram as being useful to think about where do you fit into this diagram. Do you work as a UI or a UX designer? Are you primarily focusing on the interface and design skills? Or are you more interested in how you get feedback from a user and how you might use that to shape the experience of a website or an app, for instance? If you think about where you sit within this diagram, you can think about whether your focus is to be a visual designer, or whether it's more to do with a subject like social science. And if you can figure out what your strengths are, you can figure out where you fit within this diagram, and what kind of designer you want to be. Whether you're going to be more design driven, or more audience driven. For the sake of this beginning class, we're going to look much more at a design driven approach to UI. And what this means is, we're not really going to focus so much on research and on feedback, we're going to take our form first approach to design. What that does is it puts the designer in the driving seat. It means that the designer makes all of those initial decisions about what the interface looks like, about how the interface works, before they've even got feedback from the user. And one of the reasons we're doing this is because the user sees the form first. When you go to an app or a website, you actually experience the form before you even get to the content. You're visually seeing what the thing is before you're actually interacting and experiencing it. If we put ourselves in the position of the designer rather than the user, our initial experience of an interface is somewhat different. The designer actually experiences the content before the form. Because when a designer is given material to work with to turn into a website or an app, it doesn't actually have any form to begin with. The designer is the person that develops content specific form by looking at that content, and figuring out what is the best form, what is the best structure, what is the best interface for that particular content, and for that particular idea that I want to communicate to a user.
