UI/UX Designer vs Front-end Developer: What’s the difference?

A study by Forrester Research found that well-designed user interfaces could increase website conversions by up to 200%.
Also, 53% of mobile users will leave a page if it takes longer than three seconds to load, according to Google. In that case, UI/UX designers and Front-end developers both play significant roles to design and develop high-quality and successful digital products.

They work on creating and improving the user interface and user experience of websites, mobile applications, and other digital products to make them aesthetically pleasing, professional, and user-friendly that meet the needs of the target audience.

But are they playing the same role or different?
Let's take a deeper look at how they work closely together in product design teams and how they differ.

What are UI and UX?

UI and UX are two words that you might hear frequently in the tech world. Both are crucial for creating successful and effective digital products. But what are they?

UI Design

UI stands for the user interface. It is what users use to interact with digital products to get or achieve something. Any webpage or application screen with which the user interacts is the UI. It’s the visual representation of the look and feel of a product. And UI design is the process of designing user interfaces.

UX Design

UX stands for the user experience. UX is about users’ overall experience with a product or service which includes their preferences, behaviors, habits, requirements, and feelings. The user experience may be positive, negative, or neutral. And UX design is about designing the whole experience. It’s a process of research, development, and improvement in all aspects of user interaction with a product to satisfy users.

What is Front-end development?

Front-end development is the process of developing the user interfaces of a website or app. It is typically done with web technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and it requires knowledge of web design principles, user experience design, and coding techniques.

What does a UI/UX Designer do?

UI/UX designers are responsible for creating a user interface and user experience that is visually appealing, intuitive, efficient, and enjoyable for users. They create wireframes, mockups, and prototypes of the user interface and work closely with the development team. They may conduct user research, usability testing, and creating personas and user flows to ensure that the product is effective and easy to use.

In the UX part, UI/UX designers empathize with users, identify users' needs and frustrations, and define their problems, opinions, and responses. Then they formulate a problem statement and come up with new ideas to solve them. They always think about how a product or service makes a user feel good and how easy it is for the user to meet their needs. They create a user journey map to analyze how a user interacts with a product and product strategies that set their vision and goals, and indicate how to work to achieve them. They make wireframes, and prototypes. These allow them to quickly test multiple ideas before creating a final product.

In the UI part, UI/UX designers work on visual interface design to improve the aesthetic look of a product and the usability of appropriate typography, images, space, layout, colors, etc. They improve the design quality for interaction between the user and all components of the product. They know design principles accurately and develop a strong visual eye for designing attractive and eye-catchy designs. They also work on animations that guide and inform the user in real-time, influence user decisions, and establish relationships between design elements.

What does a Front-end developer do?

Front-end development is the technical implementation of user interfaces of digital products. A Front-end developer is a type of web developer who uses a combination of programming languages such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc. to develop web pages, apps, user interfaces, and animations that enable users to interact with digital products.

HTML is used to add content to a web page including text, images, links, and other media.
CSS is used to style HTML elements on a web page, including font size, color, and spacing.
JavaScript is used to add interactivity to a web page including image galleries, social media widgets, etc.
They optimize web pages for performance, including page load times and responsiveness on multiple browsers, platforms, and devices. They perform extensive testing to ensure the website's functionality, responsiveness, and accessibility. They solve the troubleshooting and debugging issues of user interfaces. Once the product is launched, front-end developers continue to monitor its performance, gather feedback, and work on improving the user experience.

Difference between UI/UX designers and Front-end developers

While the roles of UI/UX designer and front-end developer have some overlap, they have different areas of expertise and focus on different aspects of the design and development process.

Focus

• UI/UX designers focus on the overall design and user experience of a digital product. They work on the layout, colors, typography, images, aesthetics, overall appearance, user flow, branding, style, user experience, etc.

• Front-end developers take those specifications, convert them to code, and then apply them programmatically to create the UI itself as it runs on a device. They create user interfaces for digital products using
  code such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Skills

• UI/UX designers have strong skills in graphic design, user interface design, user experience design, web design, app design, information architecture, interaction design, user research, usability testing, etc.

• Front-end developers have strong skills in programming, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and web development frameworks.

Tools

• UI/UX designers use many design tools such as Sketch, Adobe Photoshop, Figma, etc.

• Front-end developers use many tools like React, Angular, Vue, and jQuery.

Responsibilities

• UI/UX designers are responsible for creating wireframes, mockups, and interactive prototypes, designing the user interface, conducting user research, working with the development team to ensure the final product meets design specifications and user needs, etc.

• Front-end developers are responsible for coding and building the user interface based on the design specifications provided by the UI/UX designer, ensuring that the website or application is responsive, accessible, and performance-optimized.

Final Words

To create a successful product, you will undoubtedly require both UI/UX designers and Front-end developers. Most of the time, it is UI/UX + front-end rather than UI/UX vs front-end because UI/UX designers and front-end developers work closely in product design teams.

If you are looking for both of them for your business or projects to create visually appealing, responsive, user-friendly, highly effective digital products, contact Besnik. They have talented, expert, experienced teams of designers and developers to help you achieve your business goals.

Thanks for reading!