UX vs UI // What A Design Manager Cares About
UX vs UI isn't a useful way of thinking. It's about the broader skill sets and how it all fits together to paint a true skill set picture.
There’s a lot of talk about UX and UI and what’s the difference. I’ve been in the UX / product design field my whole career and have some thoughts.
I hired tons designers with UX and UI skills. I’ll break down what matters:
UX vs UI: Define The Difference
Let’s define the two. In short, UX is how things work and UI is how things look.
UX, or User experience, is about designing the whole experience. It’s concerned about the features in a product, how they work, how they help you get the job done.
It’s thought of as ease of use or how easy is it to use the app. In UX you’re looking at engagement rates, adoption, retention, task success, and overall happiness with the product.
UI is how the product looks. It’s about the aesthetic experience. UI design is concerned about spacing, layout, typography, color.
How it works versus how it looks. That’s the difference. Yes it can get nuanced than that. But for this post, that’s good enough jumping off point.
There’s overlap between the two and one affects the other. It’s not black and white as I’m making it out to be.
Shades of gray and all that.
The Product Designer
In most cases, the same designer that is doing UX or UI work. Technically yes, there can be a pure UX designer or a pure UI designer, but it’s not often you find them.
Hiring managers are looking for designers who can do both. Perhaps they want someone who is stronger in one area than the other. At the very least they want someone who has knowledge and some baseline skills in both.
A popular term for this designer that’s popped up in the past several years is Product Designer. It’s a bit of a catch all to include UX and UI designers.
Beyond UX vs UI
There’s more to UX and UI then, well UX vs UI. There’s motion design, visual UI, graphic design, experience with native app development, or experience with web design. Experience designing for mobile, or desktop, or other platforms like TV.
There’s soft skills like communication, collaboration, organization, and presentation skills.
There’s related skills like understanding and being able to conduct research. Or being able to understand analytics and turning those into actionable insights.
The list goes on. There’s so much more to a designer than just UX vs UI.
At this point it’s a bit silly to think of UX vs UI. Instead it’s about the broader picture of all the skills you need to have as a designer.
So What Does A Manager Care About?
The team makeup and do they have the right amount of skills across the team to get the job done.
Depending on the context, each manager is going to need different skill sets. And that skill set is a variety of skills, not simply one skill set.
And each skill is not a yes or no situation. They’re not binary.
It’s a spectrum.
So a manager is looking for a variety of skills and needs to understand the depth of each of those skills.
It’s not UX vs UI. It’s not how is there UX vs UI skills. It’s how skilled are they in UX? How skilled are they in UI. How skilled are they in Native App design. Communcation? Collaboration? Research. On and on.
It’s painting the picture of the skillset.
Let’s say for example a manager may be interested in the following skills:
UI Design
UX Design
Communication
Native App Experience
Research
Problem Framing
Collaboration
Presentation
Organization
For each of those they may have a five-point scale. 0 being no evidence of said skill, 5 being an expert (with respect to the designer level)
The wrong way is to assess a designer like this:
the wrong way to assess a designer
A manager (and you as a designer) is - or at least should bethinking more like this:
In the second example you can see an assessment on a wider array of skills. It's a more rounded picture of a designer who is strong in UX, not so much in UI, research, and organization, but has some baseline skills in communication, native app experience, problem framing, and collaboration.
This gives a broader picture of a designer and they do or would fit into a team.
And a manager is looking for fit. Someone who can come in and join the team and help add value.
I’ve been in positions where I had strong UX designers and researchers, but we really needed to elevate our UI level.
In that case we needed someone who was stronger in UI. We were ok with taking someone who wasn’t as strong in UX since we had designers who can help in that area.
The profile would look something like this:
In this case we needed someone who was strong in UI. They didn’t need to be strong on the other areas. We needed some baseline understanding and experience but did not need expertise.
We did want to see some sense of willing and being able to collaborate since we needed this UI designer to be able to work with a lot of different people.
The Takeaway
It’s not UX or UI or UX vs UI. It’s all about design. In most (not all) situations you’re going to be a part of a design team. And that involves more than UX or UI.
There’s a variety of hard and soft skills needed. And no one (hopefully) is expecting you to be a 10 out of 10 on every skill.
We’re people working together to solve problems, build, shape, and build great product. It’s more than a singular skill.
//Coleman
SIGN UP
〰️
SIGN UP 〰️
