We often hear about three types of design: 

  • Interaction design 
  • User experience (UX) design 
  • User interface (UI) design 

Interaction design

In the UK central government, there is a job role called Interaction Designer. The Government Digital Service define interaction design as:

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An interaction designer works out the best way to let users interact with services, in terms of both overall flow and at the level of individual design elements. 

When designing services to be user-centred, interaction design means knowing things like:

  • whether your users expect to have to scroll, rather than swipe through a list 
  • understanding where people expect to click for the next step in a journey 

Put simply, an interaction designer’s job is to help a person through their journey by ensuring the design decisions are intuitive and don’t make the user work too hard. 

There is a lot of similarity between interaction design and UX design. 

Read more about interaction design 

User experience (UX)

Cognitive scientist, Don Norman is credited with coining the term, “user experience” back in the early 1990s when he worked at Apple and defines it as: 

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‘User experience’ encompasses all aspects of the end-user's interaction with the company, its services, and its products.

Learn more about user experience (UX) design on the Interaction Design Foundation website. 

User interface (UI)

User interface (UI) refers to all the parts of a product or service that a user will interact with.

Comparing UX and UI

Often, UX and UI are used interchangeably. But what are the differences between them?

A straightforward way to compare UX and UI is to refer to UX as the ‘why’, and UI as the ‘how’.

Learn more about the differences between UX and UI on Nielsen Norman Group.