UI and UX Basics for Businesses
At the most basic level, the user interface is the collection of pages, screens, and any other visual components like icons and buttons that allow users to interact with the service or product. The internal experience that users have when they start interacting with each element of a company’s solutions is known as the user experience of that solution. Companies have to improve both the user interface and the user experience to provide a great overall experience to the customers and create more loyalty.
User interface
The user interface is anything that users can interact with when they’re using a digital service or product. That means anything from the audio, to regular screens or touch screens, lights, and keyboards. In the past, people that wanted to use a computer had to rely on the command line to be able to do so, as the graphical user interfaces that are available today weren’t available back then. However, by the 1980s, the first graphical user interface was created that allowed for people to use personal computers by using simple graphic components such as checkboxes, icons, buttons, as well as menus. This changed the way that user interfaces operated, which ended up changing the entire industry, and created new job opportunities for the user interface designers. These people are in charge of the preferences, systems, accessibility, and expectations that consumers go through with any piece of technology these days.
User experience
With the advancement of the user interface, came the evolution and user experience, which affects the way that consumers can feel about the experience they have with the company and its solutions once they are able to interact with any of them. However, user experience tends to be a broader term because it tends to include any other experience a potential customer might have with the company or its solutions, not just the ones that happen online. Although some people have started calling this real-world experience as customer experience, while the digital experience has experience design, the term user experience is relatively comprehensive and it’s of course oriented toward the way that individuals engage with a company and its solutions. That means the user experience designers are in charge of ensuring that a company provides its solutions in a way that meets the needs of the target audience, and makes it as easy for them as possible to achieve any goal that they might have.
Improvements
The core of both user interface and user experience are the customers, and companies have to use both qualitative and quantitative customer research to develop user interfaces and user experiences in a way that caters to the needs of the customers. That means companies have to know their target audiences in detail to be able to provide them with a result that the customers are going to enjoy and utilize at the same time, well, appreciating the overall experience as well.
