The short form in UI Design term, “UI” stands for “user interface,” which refers to all of the visual elements with which users of a website, app, or piece of software (or mobile device, or even appliance) interact with the design.
As a result, UI design is a close relative of graphic design, albeit one with a few additional skills—the Artist who creates user-engaging masterpieces is known as a UI Designer. Various tools for UI design are used to create required designs.
What Does a UI Designer Do?
UI Designers collaborate closely with other design specialists (including UX Designers) to ensure that each online page follows the website’s overall structure and design concept. To put it another way, UI Designers are responsible for creating each of the screens or pages that users interact with and ensuring that they all function together to provide the experience that the UX Designer is looking for. That necessitates an intelligent balance of appealing visual graphics and practical functionality—the UI Designer’s expertise is where these two intersect. To create a masterpiece design, multiple tools for UI design are on the market.
Other responsibilities of the UI Designer include:
- Producing a consistent style guide.
- Ensuring visual consistency.
- Collaborating with the product’s Graphic Designers and Copywriters to make the user experience the best.
The work of a UI Designer entails the conceptualization, design, and assembly of interactive features; however, this varies according to the type of product they’re working on, their degree of seniority, and the size of the firm they work for other things.
Read Also: WHAT IS THE GRAPHIC DESIGN PROCESS?
The UI Designer jobs can be broken down into three parts.
The UI Design expert jobs can be broken down into three parts.
1. Idea Generation:
Someone has to think up what the parts of a product will be before they can be designed—what functionality is necessary, how things will show on screen, how they’ll interact together, and so on.
Obviously, this is a highly collaborative step of the process of UI Designing. The amount of engagement a UI Designer has during this stage is determined by their seniority. A Professional UI Designer may be required to handle much of the early design concepts, collaborating with a UX Designer to establish user requirements and overall aesthetic.
A Junior UI Designer maybe has a minor role to play in conceptualizing a product’s overall look and feel. Still, they will almost certainly be in charge of creating (or assisting in the creation of) the storyboards, process flows, and sitemaps that will guide the design phase that follows. Working with the UX Designer, the UI Designer can expect to contribute to the creation of mockups and prototypes that illustrate how the final product will look, feel, function, and bring user interface and experience, as well as design specifications for the product’s development.
2. Design
The UI Designer’s job is to take the UX Designer’s research and personas and run with them, conceiving and designing interactive design elements like menus, tabs, widgets, buttons, sliders, scrollbars, page navigation and search fields, and even layouts, typefaces, color palettes, images, icons, and original graphic designs, illustrations, and animations.
These ultimately add up to the overall layout of each screen or page a user interacts with—the general intensity and hierarchy of content, as well as what belongs to where and why. It’s important to remember that websites and applications are seen on a variety of displays; the UI Designer’s work also includes making the layout feel consistent (and appealing!) across a variety of screen sizes, like mobile phones, tablets, and Laptop or computer screens.
Finally, every visual element will follow a style guide to guarantee uniformity throughout the interface pages of the product and beyond; the UI Designer is often in charge of drafting and enforcing the style guide.
3. Prototyping
After all of the visual components have been creatively created and developed, it’s time to test them out, first by detecting and resolving fundamental functionality problems and then by enabling test customers to visit the product prototypes to provide feedback on their experiences (and obviously, to make changes to the product based on that feedback for the users).
This is usually done in two stages: first, via simple clickable wireframes or prototypes, which allow developers and test users to interact with the information architecture and confirm that the design is simple to grasp and use. With that blueprint in hand, the UI Designer will collaborate with the UX Designer to create a high-fidelity prototype that includes all visual components such as graphics, animations, and page transitions.
The development team may move the product into the final phases of development after all of those pieces have been polished and the UI Designer’s job is done successfully.
Read Also: WHAT IS UX DESIGN? | WHAT IS UX DESIGNER?
