UI vs. UX
What’s the difference between the user interface and user experience?

At the most basic level, the user interface (UI) is the series of screens, pages, and visual elements—like buttons and icons—that enable a person to interact with a product or service.

On the other hand, user experience (UX) is the internal experience that a person has as they interact with every aspect of a company’s products and services.

It’s common for folks to use these terms interchangeably or incorrectly. If you’ve ever wondered, “What is UI, what is UX, and what’s the difference between them?” today we’ll dig a bit deeper into UI and UX to better understand their differences.

What is UI?

Simply put, a user interface (UI) is anything a user may interact with to use a digital product or service. This includes everything from screens and touchscreens, keyboards, sounds, and even lights. To understand the evolution of UI, however, it’s helpful to learn a bit more about its history and how it has evolved into best practices and a profession.

A brief history of the user interface

Back in the 1970s, if you wanted to use a computer, you had to use the command line interface. The graphical interfaces used today didn’t yet exist commercially. For a computer to work, users needed to communicate via programming language, requiring seemingly infinite lines of code to complete a simple task.

By the 1980s the first graphical user interface (GUI) was developed by computer scientists at Xerox PARC. With this groundbreaking innovation, users could now interact with their personal computers by visually submitting commands through icons, buttons, menus, and checkboxes.

This shift in technology meant that anyone could use a computer, no coding required, and the personal computer revolution began.

By 1984 Apple Computer released the Macintosh personal computer which included a point-and-click mouse. The Macintosh was the first commercially successful home computer to use this type of interface.

The accessibility and prevalence of personal—and office—computers meant that interfaces needed to be designed with users in mind. If users couldn’t interact with their computers, they wouldn’t sell. As a result, the UI designer was born.

As with any growing technology, the UI designer’s role has evolved as systems, preferences, expectations, and accessibility has demanded more and more from devices. Now UI designers work not just on computer interfaces, but on mobile phones augmented and virtual reality, and even “invisible” or screenless interfaces (also referred to as zero UI) like voice, gesture, and light.

Today’s UI designer has nearly limitless opportunities to work on websites, mobile apps, wearable technology, and smart home devices, just to name a few. As long as computers continue to be a part of daily life, there will be the need to make interfaces that enable users of all ages, backgrounds, and technical experiences can effectively use them.

What is UX?

User experience, or UX, evolved as a result of the improvements to UI. Once there was something for users to interact with, their experience, whether positive, negative, or neutral, changed how users felt about those interactions.

Cognitive scientist Don Norman is credited with coining the term, “user experience” back in the early 1990s when he worked at Apple and defines it as follows,

That’s a broad definition that could encompass every possible interaction a person could have with a product or service—not just a digital experience. Some UX professionals have opted for calling the field customer experience, and others have gone a step further to simply refer to the field as experience design.

No matter what it’s called, Norman’s original definition of UX is at the core of every thought experience design—it’s all-encompassing and always centered around the human being it's interacting with.

To understand what makes an experience a good one, Peter Moreville developed a great visual to highlight what goes into effective UX design.

This ‘usability honeycomb’ has become the foundation for best practices for UX professionals to help guide their efforts across multiple touchpoints with the user, including:

• How they would discover your company’s product
• The sequence of actions they take as they interact with the interface
• The thoughts and feelings that arise as they try to accomplish their task
• The impressions they take away from the interaction as a whole
• UX designers are responsible for ensuring that the company delivers a product or service that meets the needs of the customer and allows them to seamlessly achieve their desired outcome.

UX designers work closely with UI designers, UX researchers, marketers, and product teams to understand their users through research and experimentation. They use the insights gained to continually iterate and improve experiences, based on both quantitative and qualitative user research.

What's the difference between UI and UX?

At the most basic level, UI is made up of all the elements that enable someone to interact with a product or service. UX, on the other hand, is what the individual interacting with that product or service takes away from the entire experience.

Don Norman and Jakob Nielsen summed it up nicely when they said:

It’s important to distinguish the total user experience from the user interface (UI), even though the UI is obviously an extremely important part of the design. As an example, consider a website with movie reviews. Even if the UI for finding a film is perfect, the UX will be poor for a user who wants information about a small independent release if the underlying database only contains movies from the major studios.

Take Google, for example. Its famously spartan interface highlights how a great experience doesn’t require bells and whistles. By focusing on the user, Google knows that when they come to the site, they’re after one thing: information. And they want it quickly.

The fact that ‘google’ is a widely accepted verb shows how well the company delivers on that experience—and expectation. Just about anything a person has ever wanted to know can be accessed in the blink of an eye and few other search engines survive today.

Now imagine that every time you searched on Google, it took 15 seconds to get a result—you’d no longer be able to instantly get an answer to your question. Even if the interface stayed the same, your experience with Google would be dramatically different.

UI/UX experts weigh in

Not surprisingly, different people have different takes on this topic. So we reached out to some smart and talented folks from the tech industry to get their opinion.

Here’s what they had to say about the difference between UI and UX:

UX is focused on the user’s journey to solve a problem, and UI is focused on how a product’s surfaces look and function.

Ken Norton Partner at Google Ventures, former Product Manager at Google

“Start with a problem we’d like to solve. UX design is focused on anything that affects the user’s journey to solve that problem, positive or negative, both on-screen and off. UI design is focused on how the product’s surfaces look and function. The user interface is the only piece of that journey. I like the restaurant analogy I’ve heard others use: UI is the table, chair, plate, glass, and utensils. UX is everything from the food, to the service, parking, lighting, and music.”

What do you think?

As UX started to become a household term—at least at a corporate level—it wasn’t uncommon to hear folks mix up the terms or use them interchangeably. Although the field of user experience design will no doubt continue to evolve, it’s important to understand the vital role each profession plays in the wider realm of human-centered design.