Ongoing Discussion - What's the difference between UI Design and UX Design? Product Design (physical goods)

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Answer Wiki

• UX design deals with the overall experience associated with the use of a product or service.

• UI design deals with the specific user interface(s) of a product or service. The UI can be a component of UX, but many user experiences don’t have UIs. The design of a UI will be heavily informed by the UX design. The UX design will be less informed by the UI.

This is UI Design:

And this is UX Design:

There are a lot of erroneous answers in this thread.

Simply put: UX is the overall experience one has with a product or service, which can include a UI. A UI is typically a combination of visual design (the look and feel) and the interaction design (how it works). UX, however, can encompass a wide range of disciplines, from industrial design to architecture to content. 

A diagram I did a few years ago:

The UI is what people use to interact with your product, and the UX is how they feel while they do.

UX, or User Experience is an umbrella term that refers to pretty much any activity/discipline associated with product or service design. This can include:

• User research
• Usability testing
• Information architecture
• Interaction design
• UI design
• Visual design
• Prototyping
• Development
• Experience and content strategy
• Service design and delivery

UI design is an activity/discipline that focuses on the way someone interfaces with the system—graphical, physical, or otherwise. UI is an activity/discipline that is part of the UX umbrella.

User Experience Design - how the user thinks and feels
Information Architecture - how the system is organized 
User Interface Design - how the content is organized 
Interaction Design - how the user and device act and react 
Visual Design - how it looks

Some or all of the above studies can be applied across of the following fields:

Architecture, when related to buildings
Interior Design, when related to internal spaces
Industrial Design, when related to tangible objects
Graphic Design, when related to text and images
Application Design, when related to digital I/O
Web Design, when related to the browser

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This is why I don’t favor using studies as terms for design fields. Someone who designs websites is unlikely to practice just the UI component, and have others complete the rest. In my opinion, the only time you can really label yourself as a “UI designer,” is if you specialize in this study and can apply it across numerous fields—industrial and interior design have a lot of user interface elements, not just web and application design.

The same applies for a user experience designer. This is someone who practices user testing, user behaviour studies, post-launch evaluation etc. regardless of the design field.

To understand UX, read Don Norman (http://www.jnd.org/index.html). Norman finds the elements of everyday things to help explain how the user experience is affected by the smallest of details.

To understand UI, read Bruce Tognazzini (http://www.asktog.com/tog.html). Tog exposes the details that make good UIs into great UIs, couched in the foundations of cognitive psychology.

To support both of them, read Edward Tufte (http://www.edwardtufte.com/). Better yet, spend a day in one of his classes. You’ll learn more about presenting information from him than any one person.

When I design, or these days, review designs, Norman, Tog, and Tufte are top of mind as you analyze every element of a design.

Been following this thread for a while, and while this may not be as cut and dry as the fly urinal example (great example Xianhang), it certainly seems quite a good breakdown of the roles involved in the area of UX - if its too small below heres a direct link : http://www.viscomstudio.com/quor…

If I get confused about UX/UI, I refer to this. (Image taken from About Face book)

Historical context

The word “user” tells us both concepts come from Computer Science. It’s often confusing when business and marketing ideas are mapped onto a technical field.

Common usage

At least on the web, UI is used twice as often as UX (http://www.googlefight.com/index…). It’s simpler to grasp for both laymen and engineers.

Organizational context

In a small startup, the person who sketches the wireframe calling for a UI element might be the same one designing and coding it. To go to the other extreme, in a large corporation producing many lines of hardware and software products, there’s much more specialization. 

In other words, different specialty definitions might be reflecting real organizational differences related to division of labor, team size, hierarchy and roles across the industry or industries. 

Considering it as an organizational phenomena, you can research the subtleties of UX, UI, IX, and Usability by using LinkedIn. Compare relevant titles in companies in different sectors, eras, locations, and sizes. 

Some real-world observations

• Multiple UI solutions may exist for a single UX need. For example, people need documents to be maintained between sessions so they are available for later use/edits. Providing the experience of permanence can be done with a “Save” UI (as in Microsoft Word), sometimes followed by confirmations. Other software may choose to silently “save” continuously, and the “saving” action is replaced with a “Name version” action. A different UI, similar result.
  
  Another example is “Undo”. Software might pop up a “Are you sure?” dialog to confirm a destructive action, while other software (e.g., Gmail) might execute the command without a pop-up, but then display “Done. Click here to undo”. Again, two different UI flows support the same product feature: the ability to reverse an action.

• Opening multiple windows side by side is a UI feature that fills no corresponding UX need. I believe it was Alan Cooper who pointed out how it’s odd that this feature became the logo and differentiating feature for Microsoft Windows.

• Sometimes, a bad UI is intentionally designed to deliver the intended UX. InContent Farms, the browsing experience (UX) is intentionally designed to be “slippery”, not “sticky”, to encourage clicking on ads. UIs are tested to encourage leaving the page. Leaving the page without clicking on an ad would still be considered bad.

Continuing discussion can be seen here Click Here