Web prototyping, design, development… just where do a designer’s skills end and a developer’s begin?

If you don’t know what’s the difference between UX design, UI design, Front-end developement, or Back-end developement and what they can do for your project, this article is for you.

A-Web Designer vs Web Developer

Primary goals of disgners and developers are to raise user satisfaction, decrease user churn, and ensure user-based company goals are reached. Such goals might include increasing newsletter sign-ups, improving sales conversions, or identifying and removing pain points within an app.

1) Developers

• Convert the concept design to a rea-time website.
• They Build the core structure of website using coding languages. - They are further divided into 3 categories :

-Front-end: developer is a person who creates the interface and the layout of the website for the interaction between the back end of the website and the users.
-Back-end: developers are those who are responsible for the server-side web application and they are usually write the web services and APIs used by front-end developers.
-Full-Stack: developer works on different layers or stacks which includes both the front and backend.

2) Designers

• Focus on the user experience with the aesthetic and visual aspects of the website.
• Mainly responsible for the layout of the website.
• They are like the architects of the website who take care of the website's feel and look.
• Their role is to transfer the client's ideas into an appealing design.
• They use tools like Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator or Sketch to design the layout of the website.

Now you must be having a clearer idea about the roles of a website designer and a website developer.Both have a significant role in the creation of a website and both complement each other work.And to ensure the smooth working of a website they should be in regular touch with each other.

B-Design

About 94% of people abandon a poorly designed page. Great web design will let you make a great first impression and transform users into evangelists of your brand.

User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) are some of the most frequently mixed-up terms in the world of business technology.

1) What is UX Design in Web Development?

User experience design is a human-first way of designing products.

“User experience encompasses all aspects of the end-user’s interaction with the company, its services, and its products.”
– Don Norman, Cognitive Scientist & User Experience Architect.

The “user experience” part refers to the interaction between the user and a product or service.

The responsibility for UX design enforces the need for a deep and complete understanding of end-users, their motives and the value they get with the product or service.

UX primarily takes place in two distinct phases:
-research: During the research phase, the UX designers use a variety of tools and methods to better understand their intended users. Competitive analysis, user interviews, persona creation, wireframing, heuristic analysis and journey flows may all be involved.
-Validation: After the product has launched, UX designers perform usability/pain point analysis to determine if the product is producing the desired result. If not, refinements and revisions are made based on user data to make the end result better and more efficient.

*Differences Between Good and Bad UX Design

One of the main objectives of a UX design is to create an inviting, usable website that helps users get what they need and stay on your site.

The 5 Key UX Design Principles You Need To Know:
-Hierarchy: Hierarchy is one of designers’ best tools to help users move through a product easily.
-Consistency: Users expect products to be consistent with similar products they’ve used in the past. The more familiar your product is, the more easily users will learn it and the better their experience will be.
-Confirmation: Preventing errors is one of our key goals as designers. When users accidentally delete an item or make an unintended payment, their experience falls apart. Requiring confirmation for any important or irreversible action is one of the best ways to prevent these errors.
-User Control: User control comes into play in a few ways in UX, but generally users have a better experience if you give them control over where they are in the product and what they’re doing.
-Accessibility: In digital product design, accessibility typically means designing products so they’re easy for users with disabilities to use. Since we design products for people, it’s crucial that our products can be used by as many people as possible.

Exemple:

• Demonstrate current state

This means that applications that don’t provide timely feedback as to what the system is doing may create a more negative or confusing experience.

• WhatsApp’s delete message feature

Here’s what instead happens when you delete your message:

Why it’s bad UX: Informing the recipient that the sender has deleted a message somewhat defeats the purpose of deleting it in the first place. In fact, this looks way more suspicious and is likely to prompt an awkward “why did you delete the message?” type of response.

2) What is UI Design in Web Development?

Unlike UX, user interface design is a strictly digital term. A user interface is the point of interaction between the user and a digital device or product.

Users often judge a system by its interface rather than its functionality and a poorly designed interface is reason why so many software systems are never used.

In relation to websites and apps, UI design considers the look, feel, and interactivity of the product. This is often referred to as the “skin” of an application. It’s all about making sure that the user interface of a product is as intuitive as possible, and that means carefully considering each and every visual, interactive element the user might encounter.

A UI designer will think about icons and buttons, typography and color schemes, spacing, imagery, and responsive design.They also tend to be the ones creating high-fidelity mock-ups and interactive prototypes.

*Differences Between Good and Bad Interface Design

There are not a few UI design principles on the web, but the top golden rules for UI design will be the 4E’ in the following. Also, this can be the standard to judge whether it’s a good UI design:

• Error-free.
• Easy to use.
• Easy to understand.
• Effective for the end goal or product.

Exemple:
Distinction between primary and secondary buttons

When working with apps, you will have many actions that the user is able to complete. It is important to give visual importance to the primary actions.

Obviously, good design can make us feel at home and everything out there is just in the right place, while bad design will make you feel like having a bad taste in your mouth and all you want to do is to leave quickly.

C-Development

Now that you have a well-designed User Experience and an outstanding User Interface designed accordingly, you still need to create your app or website and its interface. What you have now is the visual part that actually doesn't do anything. Now it's time to let developers do their job.

Main parts of every website are: the client, the database, the server , the user:
-The Server:this part of website is responsible for holding data, running the website’s back-end architecture, processing requests, and sending response to the browser.
-The Client: requests pages from the Server, and displays them to the The User. In most cases, the client is a web browser.
-The DataBase: is a data structure that stores organized information that can easily be accessed, managed and updated.
-The User: uses the Client in order to surf the web, fill in forms, watch videos online, in other words and interact with webpage.

1) What is Front-end in Web Development?

All websites consist of structure, data, design, content, and functionality. Creating user-facing functionality is the task of a front-end developer. Using a combination of markup languages, design, client-side scripts, and frameworks, they create everything that users see and interact with: content, layout, and functional elements.

So, as you can see, for the front-end of the application to work, you need more than just User Interface. This visual part needs to be programmed. This is where front-end developers enter to do their job.

It's good when a front-end developer knows the essentials of UX and UI design principles. However, most often it is a typically technical role that needs mainly programming skills. On the other hand, you might meet front-end developers, who are UI designers at the same time.

2) What is Back-end in Web Development?

Back end development refers to the server side of an application and everything that communicates between the database and the browser.

Back-end developers create services that process business logic and access other resources such as databases, file servers, cloud services and more. These services are the backbone of any application and can be accessed and used not only by server-side rendering apps but also from client-side rendering apps.

3) Some of the technologies on which the developer works

-HTML or hypertext markup language: it is the standard computer language used to achieve graphical and functional effects on web pages.
-CSS Cascading style sheets (CSS): describes how HTML elements are to be displayed on screen, paper, or in other media.
-JavaScript: With its frameworks and libraries, JavaScript is the programming language which is used to make web pages interactive.It is called the first client-side language and is still the most common client-side script on the web.
-PHP, ASP, Java or C++: open source Back-end programming languages which are created explicitly to create dynamic sites which are different from static sites in that these types of websites store database information.
-MySQL: it is the flexible open-source database management system and it is the most popular choice for managing online content in the database.

Conclusion

This article focused on the key aspects of design and development as the way from design to real digital product.

User experience (UX) design is centered around the satisfaction the user experiences with your software. Front-end development is the technical implementation of the software’s user interface (UI). UI design is the graphical bridge that connects the two. Having these three areas working together seamlessly is the key to happy users and happy upper management alike.