UX design and Visual Design, how do they fit together?

Design RolesUX Design
Written By Avitha Celestine

User Experience (UX) is creating products that provide meaningful experiences, keeping the users in mind.

Visual design focuses on a product’s aesthetic appeal and usability.

When User Experience Designers and Visual Designers are building a product, they share the same goal: to create a successful design that works for its intended purpose and target audience. Yet there are significant differences in their responsibilities, design processes, and deliverables. A good visual design will optimize the user’s experience, and UX insight is necessary to create such a seamless experience. Both disciplines contribute to the successful design of a product. The question is can a designer do both? UX and Visual design?

First, let’s step back and see design practice as a whole. The interdisciplinary nature of UX design has created a high demand since digital technologies have become deeply integrated into every aspect of our life and environment. In a large company, the design team might consist of UX designers, UX Researchers, Interaction Designers, Information Architects, UX writers, Content Strategists, Illustrations, and Visual designers. Since it’s not linear, each discipline will collaborate to optimize its work. A small start-up may have a single designer who does all the design-related jobs and might outsource tasks like graphic design, writing, and illustrating. (Puskás, 2019) There are many discipline combinations like how UX designers tend to do UX research, Visual designers can do UI, and UX-UI designers (also known as Product designers) can do it all.

User Experience Design

According to Norman, “UX designers are concerned with the entire process of acquiring and integrating a product, including aspects of branding, design, usability, and function.” (Norman) Since User Experience is the core of any product, UX design starts early. UX designers are generalists who know a little of everything in the design process. In the design thinking process, UX designers work on all 5 phases; Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test. Since it is an iterative non-linear process, designers will go back and forth on the phases until they have created a good User Experience. (Yu, 2021)

Visual Design

Visual design improves a product’s aesthetic appeal and usability with suitable images, typography, iconography, layout, and color swatches. (What Is Visual Design?) Visual designers are specialists focused on prototyping and presentation, thus having a hybrid responsibility of UI and Graphic Design. (Babich, 2020) In the design thinking process, Visual designers work extensively on one phase; Prototype. Besides prototyping, they also research trends to create style guides, brand identity, visual concepts, UI Kits, and digital assets.

Visual Designers are also present in the Marketing department and focus on branding, making digital posters, infographics, and animations for ads, social media engagement, and multimedia. Since Visual Design is a vast field, there are other related disciplines like visual communication designer, visual identity designer, and User Interface Design.

So, when does Visual design meet User Experience?

Visual designers join a project during the Prototype Phase alongside UX designers to enhance the surface appeal and usability. They create a pixel-perfect design based on input from UX Designers and Researchers. (Puskás, 2019) Visual Designers might also be present during the brainstorming sessions (empathize) and test phase to give feedback to UX designers. Apart from that, both disciplines interact only to access information for their design processes. Some companies hire UX-UI designers to do user experience and Visual Design tasks.

UX-UI Design

Being a UX-UI designer has both advantages and disadvantages. They benefit from thinking about a problem holistically since they have access to all information and an overview of everything happening. They also have the flexibility of prioritizing and working on a problem space. It may also be a learning opportunity to do a little bit of everything and figure out their area of interest. The disadvantage to being a sole designer is managing all the different focus areas, which can get overwhelming. The time required to build the product may not suffice. Scoping of the product may be too large or too small. Lastly, bias may occur at all the different stages. “A great product is created when all design stages work concurrently and inform each other.”(Doody, 2020) Unless UX-UI designers know when to deliver each task without significant compromises, I believe the disadvantage outweighs the advantage.

Takeaway

UX design and Visual design roles sound confusing since they may somehow overlap. However, they serve different parts of the design process. UX designers will work on the product’s design process from start to finish. In contrast, Visual designers will work on the last phases to make the product’s interfaces usable and visually appealing. Keeping them separate will minimize bias; colors or visual elements won’t bias UX, and UX insights will not influence Visual Design until it’s in the Prototype Phase. It will also reduce time constraints: UX designers can spend more time on research and data synthesis, and Visual Designers will have more time to experiment with visual elements. This will help reduce cognitive overload and improve a designer’s mental health. Keeping User Experience Design and Visual Design separate will help them reach their goals, i.e., creating a successful product.

 

References

Avitha Celestine https://www.celestinetales.com/
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