UI Designer VS UI Developer

Being an amateur designer or as a design enthusiast, one of the major questions that may hit your minds is how UI designers differ from UI developers. User Interface design is one of the essential aspects of any design project and it goes hand in hand with the User Experience Design. In this article, we shall discuss how a UI designer is different from a UI developer.

It is often seen that UI developers are regarded as UX developers which is not incorrect as these designing branches are interrelated to one another. However, we keep a good practice by distinguishing them as two different departments considering their specific skills.

UI Designer

The objective of UI designers is to work on the front-end design that is enhancing different visual components that would improve the overall User Experience Design. Some of the key goals that UI designers aim to accomplish are:-

• Look and Feel of the Design
• Working on Graphic Design elements
• Research on the Design and its effectiveness
• Analysis of customers
• Puts effort on brand design
• Research on user guides and storytelling
• Responsiveness and engagement
• Design Prototyping
• Interactivity and Animation
• Design Implementation with Developers

UX Designers put together the research and design to understand the needs of the user and come up with design solutions that people want to use. This needs a study on human behaviours, their psychology and understanding. A UI designer will tell you what design should do and why it what is the purpose of it, but won’t actually build something that works.

UI Developers

Design+HTML/CSS/JS. UI Developers combine both the design sensibilities and the technical skills together. They possess expertise in making the design look good as well as functional in a browser. They are capable of producing visual designs using tools such as Photoshop and transform them into HTML code that plays a major role in determining the functionality. However, they require a deep understanding of how browser rendering engines work and hence implement a design that renders correctly and puts pixels correctly. The responsibilities of UI developers are as follows:-

• Develops UI architecture for every component providing the UI elements for entire applications.
• Co-ordinates with the development team and product team through design and development phases.
• Executes the main design principles and user experience to be implemented through high-fidelity mockups as well as the interaction flow.
• Works in accordance with Systems developers to develop scalable, standards and flexible UI architecture.

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Saurabh Tiwary