A sleek, attractive design that fulfills its set goals and complies with the usability principles is a secret to success. End-users can develop trust in the new product and start using it if they feel that it is convenient, addresses their pain points, and gives them satisfaction. Thus, in a struggle for loyal and committed customers and users, business owners use UI UX solutions to make their digital products more appealing, convenient, and accessible for their target audience.
Competition in the digital market is fierce. So, the sphere of UI/UX is gaining prominence, with more businesses striving to add value and visual appeal to their new product offerings. UI/UX specialists are the key team members that can make your project fail or fly by combining visual design with a perfect mix of features. Yet, the rising popularity has also caused a flood of incompetent designers to the online market. Many of them charge unreasonable rates for mediocre work.
So, how to find the right talent for the UI/UX design job? What exactly should you expect from such a professional? If you’re a business owner looking for a UI/UX designer for your development team, it’s time to see what exactly this expert can do for you and what skills you should consider when making the hiring decision.
Let’s start from the basics. Though UI and UX are fancy terms that laypersons often confuse, they stand for two distinct aspects of web design.
UI is an acronym for user interface, which is the design of your app’s or website’s layout. The UI specialist chooses colors, fonts, and grids for your digital product to make it user-friendly.
UX stands for the user experience, a subjective outcome of how well your UI designer did their job. UX is the degree of user satisfaction from using your resource, which determines the churn rate and makes consumers stay or leave.
So, based on these distinctions, one may figure out the major distinctions between these two design roles in a company.
The primary area of the UI designer’s responsibility is the user’s visual experience in the app or platform. An efficient, successful UI should be intuitive, meaning the user is not left wandering across pages and buttons to see what happens. Intuitive UIs follow pre-existing user assumptions about how things work. So, they can take users from point A to point B with a minimal number of clicks and efforts.
The UX designer, in their turn, focuses on the interactions between people and products or services you’re offering. The decisions of UX designers are made at the intersection of human psychology and web design essentials. The focus of UX is to make a web resource easy to use, relevant to the user’s goal with minimal efforts, looking logical and practical. These outcomes are achieved due to the UX designer’s hard work on competitor analysis, customer research, analysis of the product structure and strategy, and product prototyping based on the obtained data.
As you can see, UI is responsible for the tools a user has to interact with the digital product. UX, in its turn, measures how the user feels after that interaction. If the UI designer does everything right, the user will be happy and content.
UI/UX design is located at the intersection of numerous areas of web design. Thus, to become a UI/UX designer, you need to possess an extensive list of skills and competencies. Here are some of them. Still, the list is not final as some companies may be less demanding to beginners. Others may pose much more stringent requirements when hiring senior-level specialists:
Now let’s consider what a typical company wants from a UI/UX designer in terms of qualifications and expected job duties:
It’s also vital to mention that UI/UX designers are not the only people working with the app’s design and development. They are surrounded by other web design experts taking the lead at different stages of the development process. For instance, the UI/UX designer frequently collaborates with:
As you can see, the UI/UX designer’s job is all-encompassing and flexible. It needs numerous related skills and multiple areas of expertise to navigate the cross-functional web design team. So, if you have a passion for design, you have multiple areas for self-realization in UI/UX and related domains.
