What Is The Difference Between UI and UX Designers in Prototype Design

Prototype design is an essential part of software developing, no matter you are a UI or UX designer, many people have the work of making a prototype. But, what's the difference between UI and UX designers? Here, let me tell you the three differences that I have noticed.

1. The core they care

The most important difference between UI and UX designers is that they have a or the different understanding of prototyping. Many UI designers believe the prototypes should be hi-fi model, sometimes even mix the spurious with the genuine.
However, for the UX designers, fidelity is only one point for concerning, they care more about logic. Simply speaking: when you're going to meet your customers, please take the design made by UI designers. When you're going to meet the programmers, you should have a second thought and take the prototype made by UX designers.
The reason is really simple too. UI designers pay more attention to the interface, front end. But UX designers prefer the back end, they need to be logical.


2. The color they use

Because UI and UX designers have different understanding of prototype, this also brings the differences between UI and UX designers. UI designers usually use the image they have already designed, and these images are more vivid. When a UX designer tries to make a prototype, he would care that much about the beautiful colors, instead, there are generally only three colors in prototype design: black, white and gray.
This difference can be seen commonly on the designing and using of icons. For example, when you need to create a bottom navigation bar, UI designers will spend lots of energy to make everything more specific, including the button color before and after clicking. On the contrary, UX designers would put the button at the right place, then leave a note: Gray after clicking.



3. The tool they choose

Since there are so many differences between UI and UX designers, the tools they use must be different. For UI designers, it will be wonderful if they could use the images they have designed. Hence, tools like Flinto and Principle which are bounded to Sketch have already took the advantage. InVision is also doing really good at this point, the team collaboration function makes them even better.
I'm afraid that UX designers wouldn't love those, they always start with wireframe, that will save time and make the design more efficient. There are lots of qualified prototyping tools: Mockplus with easy and visible operation, Balsamiq with sketch style, and Axure with comprehensive functions. What's more, there's a unique strength in Mockplus, it has 8 ways to test and preview the projects. This is helpful in the testing.



There are too many differences between UI and UX designers, here I just post three of them during the prototype designing. If you are interested in this kind of topic, please read this one for more information, UX vs UI vs IA vs IxD: 4 Confusing Digital Design Terms Defined. It's more about UI and UX designers job description.



More thing to say
At this point, I'm thinking about something else: here I said in prototype design, but it seems that there is a problem, the visual renderings made by UI designer, is that a prototype? One step further, what is a prototype? Wireframe? Interaction? Visual renderings? PRD? Flow chart? All of the above? None?
If you have any thought, please let me know.

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