What are UI and UX and how are they different?
You probably know the feeling of being on a badly designed, hardto-use website, one that brings anger and frustration. But did you know that when that happens, you’ve probably just experienced a bad user interface and had a bad user experience? But what are UI (user interface) and UX (user experience), and how are they different?
Though they work in tandem, UI is all the elements that go into the design of something we, as humans, interact with. You can imagine a web page with photos, text and buttons and picture all of that together as a user interface. But user interfaces can also be the design of how you interact with a voice-operated device such as Amazon’s Alexa, or even how a phone’s physical design is meant to be held in your hand and where the buttons on it go.
UX, on the other hand, is the overall feel of a designed experience. Did looking at a website with too much text and bad colors make you anxious? Did you smile when Siri told you a joke? Those are examples of different outcomes of user experience. Good UI (the interface) can create a positive UX (user experience), and there’s a whole field of analytical studies that work to improve overall UX by determining how to improve UI on all kinds of devices and software we interact with.
In this space every week, we’ll define a tech term, offer a timely tip or answer questions about technology from readers. Email ogallaga@statesman.com.