So you have a fabulous project in mind, and all you need is the right website design company to breathe life into it. As you look for one, it gets harder and harder to figure out what each of them do. The language they use is full of technical terms that they like to throw around casually.
While some companies claim to do web design, others boast of specializing in UX and UI design. Quite a few claim to do both. You find yourself scratching your head in confusion because you just can’t tell the difference.
What’s the website design? Is there a difference between web design and UX design? If you’re new to the world of web design, finding your way around these terms can feel very overwhelming.
Well, you can stop worrying because we are here to shed some light on the major differences between UX and web design and the kind of work that each entails.
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Let’s Start With The Basics
We’ll list the basic definitions here to help ease your confusion and give you some context before we delve deeper into the differences.
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Web Design: Web design is a broad umbrella term used to refer to anything related to designing a website or web application, its usability, and its visual elements. These could be anything from UI and UX web design to other areas such as human-centered design, Customer Experience (CX), conversion rate optimization, and so on.
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User Experience (UX): User experience or UX design encompasses all design activities focused on user behavior, feelings, and designing something from the perspective of a user/customer. As is evident, UX design is a more human-centered design approach than web design in general.
As is evident, both these terms can sometimes overlap in meaning, and none of them are mutually exclusive. To put it differently, UX design and web design are almost two sides of the same coin. Understanding how this works takes time: the two terms are not just limited to which handles which part of the design but also how each term does the same work but from a different perspective.
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Deconstructing Web Design
It’s safe to say that web design is a bit of an old-fashioned term to use. It dates back to the days when a single individual handled pretty much every aspect of a website design. Thanks to rapid technological advancement, web design has become more of an umbrella term and less of a specific task.
As we mentioned earlier, web design encompasses many other design aspects, such as UI/UX, CRO, and IA or Information Architecture. As designers get more and more competitive, newer categories continue to emerge under the aegis of web design.
In general, web design is about creating the visuals and functionalities of a particular website or application. But it’s more than just visuals. When a web designer sits down to work on a specific website, they have to know pretty much everything, from digital trends, customer expectations to technicalities, and usability.
The web designer handles the following tasks:
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Conventional graphic design such as colors, typography, and font
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Understanding terms like closing and leading so that they can create more appealing CTA layouts
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Creating icons, interfaces, and graphics
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In web design, you can start by making a wireframe or layout of your design. And once that’s done, you can send it to the web developer to code the design.
So now you know what web design is. Let’s find out what user experience web design is.
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Breaking Down UX Design
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User experience is how a person feels when they interact with your website, app, or software. You’d be surprised to learn how UX design is often like web design, only from the user’s viewpoint. How does the layout of my web page affect my customer? Does the user interface make users happy? How do I design a registration page that makes a user want to sign up instantly?
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So, UX design is the art of telling a story through your design. A UX designer can hold a conversation with users through their design and tell them what to do and how to interact with the interface. In short, it’s all about understanding the why’s and how’s of web design.
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Why does someone click on a red button instead of a green one?
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Why does a user scroll to the bottom of a page?
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Why won’t the user sign up or fill out a form?
These are some of the questions that UX designers routinely ask themselves.
4. Some Final Thoughts
Before the days of user-centered design, there was hardly any difference between a UI/UX and web designer. Before the days of user and human-centered design, websites were made much more differently. Critical design decisions were solely made based on what designers thought worked or felt awesome.
There was no science backing the website design of the old days, unlike UX design now. The website design was mostly just creative and based on what businesses or clients wanted.
But with rapid progress in technology, accessibility, and a great user experience become all the more important.
So now that you know the differences between UX and web design, it’s time to create a truly memorable experience for your customers. For that, the right combination of creativity, communication, and design skills is necessary.
So what are you waiting for? Hire the right website design company today, and watch it deliver the best results.