What is UI/UX Design? Everything You Need to Know

UI and UX are the central spines of everything a user can interact with while using any smart device in the present era of technology evolution.

 

UI and UX design are two sides of the same coin; that refer to the essentials of design, customer experience, and customer satisfaction. UI stands for User Interface, which specifically entails the design, colors, animations, and overall design look.

 

UX entails a user experience that focuses on the functionality of the design in delivering a smooth experience to the user. They both differentiate from each other with nuances that we will discuss later.

Let’s discuss each of them one by one.

What is UI/UX Design in the first place?

UI/UX designs are different from each other with the hue of nuances in terms of their usability and features for the user. Let’s have a look at UX/UI design and its fundamentals.

UI Design

The user interface creates a place for the users to interact with the computing world using digital designs. With the help of the user interface, the users can navigate through a website or an electronic device.

The main focus of the UI design is to create aesthetically appealing designs, buttons, navigation systems, previews, and other visual elements. To increase the design and art of a display, user interface design has the most crucial role.

Optimizing a user-interface design according to the audience's requirements is deemed essential to increase usability and interactivity throughout. A smooth design with smooth and appealing navigation boosts user retention and attracts more users.

UX Design

User experience and user interface are interlinked together. Therefore, user experience and its design is one of the most prioritized elements in a digital design so that it is logical, fun, and functional for the user. Regarding UX design, it is more related to the practical implementation of ease of usability and more interactivity.

Creating a UX design entails bringing the ideas to fruition so that it is well-executed and well-rendered to the users. It is the course of interaction that a user has through a user interface, ensuring it is seamless that meets the requirements of the target audience.

UX design is based on collecting the target audience or user’s feedback, suggestions, user journey, user persona, reviews, and extensive market research. All those factors help produce an intuitive user experience design to bridge the gap between user expectations and services/products/companies.

 

 

Fundamentals of UI/UX Design

The fundamentals of UI/UX design vary from the nature of their functionality and usage. However, here is the list of UI/UX design fundamentals that focus on their core features and operability.

Fundamentals of UX Design

The core fundamentals of UX design revolve around five factors: 

• Empathy
• Strategy
• Usability
• Inclusivity 
• Validation

 

Empathy

 

It redirects the user experience designer to put themselves in the user's shoes and produce designs that guarantee ease of usability and accessibility. Empathy helps in generating more power and initiative design based on user-centred preferences.

Strategy

It follows a set of goals, guidelines, and flowcharts to execute a user-friendly design. Having a well-devised UX crafting strategy leads to following each process from scratch through testing and till the completion of the design.

Usability

The alphabet ‘U’ is the leader of UX design since every digital UX design and designer revolves around it. To provide easy access, maximum functionality, and ensure user-friendliness, the UX designer must ensure the design fulfills optimal usability. 

Inclusivity

One approach that a design has to follow is ‘design for all.’ This mantra is that user experience design enables designers to create content inclusive to all races, ages, genders, backgrounds, socioeconomic statuses, and more. 

Validation

The user validation for the design experience comes above all. Therefore, a user must validate the design, whether it's fulfilling the user's expectations and requirements or not. Feedback forms and suggestions help designers conduct the validation process.

Fundamentals of UI Design

The fundamentals of UI Design revolve around five factors:

• Visibility
• Consistency 
• Feedback
• Predictability
• Learnability 

 

Visibility

It is critical to understand what needs to be visible to the user so they can easily navigate the design. Not everything is important that demands be highlighted. Therefore, making an understandable and easy-to-navigate design is necessary.

Consistency

Keeping the design the same throughout the updates and changes is important to make navigation easier for the user. Consistency should be maintained throughout the updates, from buttons to colors to typography and other design elements.

Feedback

Give feedback to the users as they process action and complete it to ensure that their actions have been well-processed. Playing with the visual elements of the user interface of an app, webpage, and digital pages will give a seamless customer experience. 

Predictability

It is important to let users know of their next action to have complete info on their course of action to complete a process. Not highlighting predictability can lead to confusion for the users which is not a good practice.

Learnability

It refers to all four elements mentioned earlier that add up to developing a user-friendly interface giving cues to the users. Learnability gives the details to the user interface designer to ensure an intuitive design and smooth experience.