What is User Interface Design?

If you build it, they will come. Well, that depends on how you've built it. If you've built it badly, they almost certainly won't come back.

Interface design that produces a positive user experience is not a matter of chance or intuition. It happens because of a systematic process that includes data gathering, high-level structure, detailed design, task-flow parameters, and testing. Everything has to be in place.

When the interface is well designed, it is comprehensible, predictable, and controllable - users feel competent, satisfied, and responsible for their actions. In web design, the person who is responsible to design an interface that is intuitive, easy to use, and allows the users to maximize their efficiency and effectiveness is called a user interface (UI) designer.

What does an UI Designer do?

A UI designer will work closely with an Information Architect and technologists to ensure that the interface supports the architecture. In a user-centered design approach the UI designer will focus more on what the user likes, and what they will expect from the site. It is the UI designer that will dig in up to the elbows to understand the users and the tasks they perform in order to design interfaces that will produce the best user interaction and experience.

The UI designer will also be concerned with download times, horizontal scrolling, page lengths, and browser differences. Other considerations include industry standards, human factors engineering, intuitiveness, consistency, and selecting the appropriate types of user interactions (pull down menus, pop up windows, check boxes, radio buttons, icons, scrolling lists, etc).