Decoding UX/UI Design: More Than Just Pretty Buttons?
15 August 2022 · Rich Bartlett
Whenever someone asks what I do, I say UX/UI design. And then I watch their face do the thing.
"So you… make apps look nice?"
Sort of. But also, not really. Here's how I explain it.
What UX actually means
Shifat Jaman puts it well: UX design is about the emotional and psychological interaction between a person and a product. It's not the buttons. It's how using those buttons makes you feel — and whether you can find them in the first place.
UX design asks: Does this thing work for real people? Not just technically, but humanly. Can you find what you're looking for? Does the experience feel trustworthy? Would you come back?
UI (User Interface) design is related but distinct — it's about the visual and interactive layer: typography, colour, spacing, micro-interactions. UI without UX is a beautiful interface nobody can use. UX without UI is a functional experience that feels unpleasant. Good products need both.
The UX process (roughly)
UX doesn't start with screens. It starts long before that, usually with these steps:
1. User research Who are you designing for? What do they need? What do they currently struggle with? This might involve interviews, surveys, observation sessions, or reviewing existing analytics. The goal is to replace assumptions with evidence.
2. Competitive analysis What are comparable products doing? What works? What doesn't? You're not copying — you're understanding the landscape your users already inhabit, and finding opportunities to do better.
3. User journey mapping Before any screen gets designed, you map the user's experience from end to end. What's the first thing they do? Where do they get confused? Where do they drop off? A user journey map makes invisible friction visible.
4. Prototyping Low-fidelity first (sketches, wireframes), then higher-fidelity as the design becomes more defined. The goal is to make something testable as quickly and cheaply as possible — before developers write a single line of code.
5. Testing and iteration Put the prototype in front of real users. Watch what they do. Ask questions. Note where they hesitate. Revise. Repeat.
Why it matters before the developers start
One of the most common misconceptions about UX is that it's a final-stage concern — something you add at the end to make the product look polished. The opposite is true.
Good UX happens before development begins, because fixing a design problem in a Figma file costs almost nothing. Fixing the same problem after it's been built and shipped costs orders of magnitude more — in time, money, and user trust.
UX design is, at its core, a risk management discipline. Every research session, user test, and design iteration is a bet that the insights gathered will prevent costly mistakes later.
So: more than pretty buttons? Yes. Quite a bit more.