What Does a UI/UX Designer Do? (With Salary and Skills)

Updated 17 August 2022

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User experience (UX) and user interface (UI) designers create digital products and interfaces that are user-friendly and intuitive. If you are interested in working with the latest technologies and want to give customers a favourable experience of your digital products, it might be the career for you. Furthermore, it may be beneficial to understand what does a UI/UX designer do to make an informed career choice. In this article, we will discuss what a UI/UX designer is, explore their average salary and discover the skills required to excel in this career.

What Is A UI/UX Designer?

A UX designer focuses on the user's journey to solve problems, whereas a UI designer focuses on making the product or interface beautiful. Both play an important role in urging a customer to purchase a product. A UI designer is different from a UX designer in the following ways:

What is a UX designer?

A UX designer is responsible for creating services, products and technology as user-friendly as possible. UX designers monitor users' experience with digital platforms or products, understand areas of improvement and boost digital offerings to ensure the product or interface is user-friendly. Their primary responsibility is understanding the requirement and behaviour of a user and creating products that enable a user to achieve a task with minimal effort. These designers focus on the interactive features, usability and information architecture of different products.

What is a UI designer?

UI designers focus on maximising the interaction of a user with a product or interface. They make an informed decision regarding the product's overall look, feel and aesthetics. It is the responsibility of a UI designer to ensure that the user interface is intuitive and beautiful. These designers are an integral part of a design team because their UI design can shape how a user perceives a brand.

What Does A UI/UX Designer Do?

While you can become both a UX and UI designer, the job duties of these two professions are different. Here are some specific roles and responsibilities of each profession:

Responsibilities of a UX designer

A typical workday of a UX designer may involve the following job responsibilities:

Conduct user research

A UX designer carries out in-depth research to understand the requirements of a user. The research focuses primarily on motivation, behaviour and the need of the user. It helps a designer understand the scope and opportunities in a particular market. Also, it helps to develop a new product or improve the existing ones. They may collect the research data through user interviews, focus groups and surveys.

Create user persona

Another critical component of the user experience design process is creating and developing a user persona. UX designers interpret their findings from the research they conduct to create a representative persona based on user's behaviour and demographics. Each persona they create may represent a user's requirement, demographic information and how the product will fit the user's daily routine.

Determine the information architecture (IA)

IA describes the way a designer organises and maps information in a product or interface. A user experience designer determines the IA to structure information to match the needs of their user. It is a blueprint that helps users understand where they are, where the information is and how to find the information they require.

Design wireframes

The first step towards building a final digital product is creating low-fidelity design sketches called wireframes. These wireframes present the various stages of the product throughout the user journey. It provides a representation of UI design elements, which helps the designer to create and develop the design further.

Create prototypes

A prototype is the high-fidelity design of a product that a UX designer creates for user testing and showing the product to the development team. These prototypes have the same look, feel and functionalities replicating the final product closely. Using these prototypes, a designer identifies the scope for improvement.

Conduct user testing

Through user testing, a UX designer allows different users to interact with a prototype. It helps to analyse the design's usability, accessibility and intuitiveness. This testing is the last step in product design, as it identifies the changes required to proceed with development.

Duties of a UI designer

Some responsibilities of a user interface designer are:

Functionality testing

Carrying out functionality testing multiple times is one of the prime responsibilities of a user interface designer. Through testing, they ensure the product provides easy navigation to the users. It helps troubleshoot navigation and makes improvements to provide an excellent experience to users.

Design

A UI designer takes the persona developed and research conducted by the UX designer to create distinct design elements like tabs, menus, widgets, buttons, search fields, navigation, images, icons, layout, animations and colour pallets. These designers build visual touchpoints that improve a user's interaction with a product or interface. They are also responsible for enforcing their client's style guide to ensure consistency throughout the product.

Collaboration with different professionals

User interface designers collaborate with multiple professionals like UX designers and web developers to understand the project's scope. It helps them create interfaces that are easy to navigate and use. They also work with user experience designers to determine the user requirement and overall look and feel of the final product.

Salary Of UI And UX Designer

The national average salary of a UX designer is ₹5,68,655 per year, while a UX designer earns ₹2,89,689 per year. The salary varies depending upon your job location, experience, education and skills. Some of the top-paying cities for UI and UX designers are:

For UX designer

For UI designer

What Are The Skills Required For A UI/UX Designer?

To become a successful UI and UX designer, a candidate should have the following skills:

Hard skills

Some of the hard skills to excel in this profession are:

Proficiency in UI and UX tools: proficiency and hands-on experience with leading design and prototyping tools can help you create product designs your users will like. Also, familiarity with wireframing tools, A/B testing tools, user surveys and content inventory tools will help you get hired faster.
Visual designs skills: understanding the power of visuals can help communicate the desired message to your customers or clients. UI and UX designers require visual design skills for products and interfaces that capture the user's attention.
Interaction design skills: intuitive and user-friendly interaction design helps a user find information and use the product with minimal effort. Design elements like motion, physical space, sound and aesthetics can increase the user's interaction with your product.
Coding skills: though you do not require mastery of any coding language, basic CSS and HTML skills can help you make minor changes to a website. It is important because you may test the website's feature for functionality and should be able to code minor changes without taking help from a professional developer.
UX writing skills: this skill is about creating a UI copy or text that appears throughout the interface of a product, including an app or website. Excellent UX writing skills can guide a user through the product's interface intuitively.

Soft skills

Some essential soft skills for this job role are:

Communication skills: a designer has to communicate and collaborate with production teams, users, clients and other designers. Excellent communication skills are essential for conducting user research and showcasing the result to business stakeholders.
Teamwork skills: these designers have to work collaboratively with users, web developers and stakeholders, so they should work well in a team. Teamwork is an essential skill as it helps you develop products based on user requirements. It also allows you to listen to problems and troubleshoot them to achieve a common business goal.
Empathy: understanding how users think and feel about a digital product is a desirable skill to excel as a designer. Based on your observation, you should be able to challenge your assumptions, understand your users' problems and find solutions to solve these problems.
Project management skills: taking a product design from ideation to delivery is an important skill to master. As a UI and UX designer, you take the product to the delivery stage by coordinating with the design team, staying on schedule and budget. This requires excellent project management skills.

What Are The Three Most Important Skills Of A UI/UX Designer?

The three most essential skills of a UI/UX designer are:

Visual and interaction design skills
User empathy
Proficiency in design and prototyping tools

Salary figures reflect data listed on Indeed Salaries at time of writing.