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What is the Difference between UI and UX Design?

Several companies look for talented resources that possess both UI and UX design skills. The major reason is that having both the skills proves to be an attractive combo for the employer. Although having both UI and UX design skills may prove to be beneficial, there are certain unique differences between the two. In this blog, we will understand the differences between UI and UX Design.

1. Focus Areas

UI stands for User Interface, which is a series of specific assets users interact with in order to experience a product or service. For example: screen, pages, and other visual design elements such as colors and typography, button, icons, etc.

UX stands for User experience which deals with the interaction and experience users have with a company’s internal products and services. Based on a user’s experience, the interaction patterns can be modified and made better.

Both these terminologies may seem to be similar, but they are not. While a good UI design helps to attract users, a good UX design helps to sell the products or services. While UI caters to only interfaces, UX designing caters to products and services in addition to interfaces.

2. Responsibilities

UI designers are responsible for creating an attractive product appearance which results in branding and graphic development, customer analysis, and creating user guides or storylines. They work on developing UI prototypes and implementing it.

The UX designer is responsible for content strategy, customer analysis, and product strategy. They work on prototyping, testing, development and planning of overall user experience for company’s products and services.

3. Colors in Use

This is a unique difference between both the designers. UI designers tend to design the prototypes in full color. On the other hand, UX designers use only three colors in the prototype design – Black, White, and Gray.

This difference can be prominently seen in their designing styles specially in the usage of assets like icons, buttons, pages, images, drop down lists, text fields, checkboxes, etc.

4. Tools

The functioning of the two roles differ because of the different tools used by the UI and UX designers.

For UI designers, designing images is of utmost importance. They tend to use the best tools for creating images such as, Flinto and Principle. Both these tools offer the ability to sketch, which comes handy for developing images.

UX Designers look for tools that help them modify and improvise user experience from time to time. This means, they must be able to test and preview projects from time to time. Mockplus is one such prototyping tool that is helpful during the testing process.

Both the roles may be distinct, but they complement each other. However, it is important to understand the differences between the two roles in order to use them wisely. In conclusion, let us summarize all the differences.


UI Designer UX Designer
Takes care of how things look Takes care of how things work
UI elements include icons, drop down lists, text fields, buttons, and more. UX elements include visual design, usability, interactive patterns, and more
Uses full colors for prototyping Uses White, Black, and Gray colors for prototyping
Focuses on Emotions Management Focuses on Goal Management
Manages branding and graphic development Manages content and product strategy