Intelligent Design: How UX and UI Designers Make a ‘Huge’ Difference

The Vans shoe company has two great assets:  shoes and athletes.  But they also had an issue:  how to merge both of them into a single digital space allowing those popular athletes to sell the shoes.

So the company turned to Huge, Inc., a digital agency with offices in eight cities including Los Angeles.  That’s where Brandon Applefield and his team took over.  What happened next not only solved Vans’ problem, but it highlights the difference in user experience (UX) design and user interface (UI) design.

Applefield, an “architect of experience,” knew he had to make the stories about the athletes part of the actual commerce of the site.

“Browsing and reading content is all shopping in itself,” said Applefield, an associate experience lead at Huge, Inc. “So we wanted to make sure that the product was with the stories.”

Applefield came up with a blueprint to merge the two, but as they say at Huge:  “Design never ends here.”  From there, the concept went to UI designers to make sure it was technically feasible.  “Is it beautiful? Is it simple?”

Others will consider whether it fits into the overall brand mission.  This convergence of design thinking illustrates the difference between UX (will users enjoy the actual content on the site) and UI (can they navigate the site with ease).  At Huge, Inc., they are distinctly separate jobs, but ultimately achieve a common goal.

“Someone can champion the user. Someone can champion the brand… the visual experience,” says Applefield. “And someone can champion building it the right way.”

“Someone can champion the user. Someone can champion the brand… the visual experience,” says Applefield. “And someone can champion building it the right way.”

Some smaller companies have tried to combine these tasks, creating a well-documented debate within the design community.  “This is because they're sometimes confused as to the individual roles each position plays,” said Devin Schoeffler, a senior web designer at CyberCoders. “Or they fail to see the value in separating the two positions.”

But as technology progresses and the complexity of the work increases, Schoeffler says many companies are seeing the value in both roles.  Here's how he breaks them down:

User Experience Design (UX)

• User Research
• Usability Analyst
• Information Architect
• Interaction Designer
• UX Designer (usually a jack of all trades)

User Interface Design (UI)

• Visual Designer
• Art Director
• Front-End Developer
• UI Engineer

Back at Huge, Inc., Applefield is quick to point out that no designer works in a vacuum.  During the design process the UX designer is consulting with UI developers “to make sure that what we’re designing is possible. We can have that collaborative discussion.”

Just as in constructing a building, he says, an architect does not pour the foundation and lay the bricks.

“The blueprint is the structure of what the building will look like but it’s not the final structure you actually walk through,” he says. “We come together (as designers) to put the whole picture together.”