There are more and more people jumping into digital marketing at the moment, many of them translating from more traditional marketing roles. They would be coming across two new concepts that are critical for digital marketing: UX and UI. Whether building a website, an app, or any other kind of service, these two terms are at the center of a lot of conversations. Here we’ll give you a quick rundown of what each one is and what makes them important.
UX Basics
In the simplest terms, the UX, or user experience, the overall effect that your user will get from using your product from start to finish, whether that’s a retail journey or using a service like online casino. For instance, if someone heads to https://betting.betfair.com/casino/, a UX designer would want to make sure they went from tutorials to signup and then onto their game of choice in the most streamlined way possible with the fewest steps from start to finish.
In the example above, if the graphics were great and every game a player could want was included, but it took hundreds of clicks to open a slot, then that would be considered a UX failure as the player would be frustrated and put off by the process.
UI Basics
UI stands for user interface, which includes any part of the software or app that a user would directly interact with. Without a UI, the developer would be presenting raw programming code to the user and expecting the average person to know how that works.
As the design specialists at https://www.sketch.com show, a UI can range from basic to incredibly detailed and optimized. A basic UI may consist of flat buttons, a single menu bar, and plain colors with minimal design. On the other hand, a detailed UI may include scrolling images, animated buttons, menus that adjust for screen size and shape, reactive search bars, and so much more.
How They Work Together
While UI is far from the only thing involved in UX, it underpin all the key features of a great UX. Take, for example, a site like https://www.airbnb.com, a site packed with a lot of functions all in one place. If the UI was poor in this case, the average user could be easily confused with all of the sections, options and search results.
Digital marketing pros know to take both halves into consideration at once, and the importance can come down to something as outwardly simple as button design. Details can include the size of the buttons, the color scheme, the size and content of the button text, and even how the button animates. All of this can be done for a single button design out of several on just one site, showing how detailed the process can go.
Of course, this is only the very tip of what both UX and UI are made of, and both use skillsets that can take years to master. Hopefully though, this provides at least a good starting point for the journey.