At the most basic level, the user interface (UI) is the series of screens, pages, and visual elements—like

buttons and
icons—that you use to interact with a device
(Source: Fast Co Design)
User experience (UX), on the other hand, is the internal experience that a person has as they interact with every aspect
of a company’s products and services.

(Source: User Experience Rocks)

But as much as I love that cartoon, it’s not exactly a comprehensive explanation! Let’s dig a little bit deeper into UI and
UX to get a better understanding of the differences between them.
What is UI?
Back in the 1970’s, if you wanted to use a computer you had to use the command line interface, which looked like this:

(Source: Jason Scott)

You couldn’t buy a computer with graphics, icons, buttons, or a mouse. They didn’t exist commercially yet. To get the
computer to do what you wanted, you had to speak to it in a computer programming language.
Then in 1981, a group of computer scientists at Xerox PARC developed and launched the Xerox Star—a personal
computer with the very first graphical user interface (GUI).
It used windows, icons, drop-down menus, radio buttons, and checkboxes. And it allowed users to open, move, and
delete files.

(Source: Wikipedia)
It might not look like much compared to what’s available today. But at the early stages of the personal computing era,
the GUI was a revolution.
It meant you no longer had to rely on writing code to use a computer, making it far more accessible to the masses.
The teams at Apple Computer continued to develop and expand on the idea of the GUI. And in 1984 they released the
Macintosh, which was the first commercially successful desktop computer to use an interface with multiple windows
and a point-and-click mouse.

(Source: oldcomputers.net)
The advent of the GUI introduced the need for a new breed of designer—one who was focused on the graphical
interface of a personal computer. And that’s when the UI designer stepped onto the scene.
This discipline has evolved over the last few decades, and it’s going to continue to evolve in the future.
UI designers today are working on websites, apps, wearables, and other programs. They may be responsible for things
like designing the layout of a digital product’s interface and the visual elements on all the pages or screens of the
system.
What is UX?
The term UX was coined by cognitive scientist Don Norman in the early 1990’s while he was VP of the Advanced
Technology Group at Apple.
Here’s how he formally defines it:
“‘User experience’ encompasses all aspects of the end-user’s interaction with the company, its services, and its
products.”
In an email explaining the origin of the term, Norman wrote:
“I invented the term because I thought Human Interface and usability were too narrow: I wanted to cover all aspects of
the person’s experience with a system, including industrial design, graphics, the interface, the physical interaction, and
the manual.
Since then, the term has spread widely, so much so that it is starting to lose its meaning.”
By definition, user experience covers a broad range of disciplines, and it can be hard for some to wrap their heads
around (like myself when I was first learning about it).
But in a more recent essay, Norman elucidated on the combination of ingredients that go into achieving a high-quality
user experience:
“The first requirement for an exemplary user experience is to meet the exact needs of the customer, without fuss or
bother. Next comes simplicity and elegance that produce products that are a joy to own, a joy to use.
True user experience goes far beyond giving customers what they say they want, or providing checklist features. In order
to achieve high-quality user experience in a company’s offerings there must be a seamless merging of the services of
multiple disciplines, including engineering, marketing, graphical and industrial design, and interface design.”
UX isn’t limited to the visual interface of your product. It’s a concept that has many dimensions and encompasses the
entire journey a person takes, including:
The process they go through to discover your company’s product
The sequence of actions they take as they interact the interface
The thoughts and feelings that arise as they try to accomplish their task
The impressions they take away from the interaction as a whole

(Source: Peter Moreville)

UX designers are responsible for ensuring that the company delivers a product or service that meets the needs of the
customer and allows them to seamlessly achieve their desired outcome.
They may do that by conducting user research to get as much context as possible about the user of the product and then
using those learnings to mockup wireframes and prototypes to help the user get from point A to point B.
What’s the difference between UI and UX?
Don Norman and Jakob Nielsen summed it up perfectly when they said:
“It’s important to distinguish the total user experience from the user interface (UI), even though the UI is obviously an
extremely important part of the design.
As an example, consider a website with movie reviews. Even if the UI for finding a film is perfect, the UX will be poor for a
user who wants information about a small independent release if the underlying database only contains movies from the
major studios.”
Google is another good example. Its interface is simple. There’s barely anything to the UI—just a logo, a search bar, a
few buttons, and a search results page.

But when you type something into that search box, you get access to nearly the entirety of digitized human knowledge
in less than one second.

Now imagine that every time you searched on Google it took 15 seconds to get a result—you’d no longer be able to
instantly get an answer to your question. Even if the interface stayed the same, your experience with Google would be
dramatically different.