What Is the Difference Between UX/UI Designer & Front-end Developer?
It doesn’t matter how much money you’re paying to create a design for your website or app if you aren’t focused on improving the experience of those who visit it. 88% of visitors won’t return to a digital resource if it’s not user-friendly and engaging. As a startup, you want to come up with the most effective design strategy and find the most fitting tools to realize it to create a project that will be profitable for you, and rewarding and helpful for users.
In a nutshell, you need to create a test product to check if whatever business idea you’ve come up with truly delivers a user experience worth returning to. In digital projects, it’s the job of a whole team — product manager, UX researcher, designers, and front-end developers to do that — to wrap up your value proposition into a form that fits the user’s expectations and wants. Let’s briefly talk about the latter two. (Note, that front-end devs are often called UI/UX developers, so we’ll be using these terms interchangeably throughout the article.)
Hiring these specialists might cost you quite a lot. What do you do if you have limited finances and can’t afford to hire both?
Job Descriptions' Breakdown
Let’s do an in-depth review of these professions and the chief responsibilities that are assigned to them. In the end, that will help you figure out what you need right now and who to hire to boost your project’s objectives. Let’s get into it!
UI/UX Designer
Usability, storytelling, and engagement of the website are these professionals’ main impact areas. User experience (UX) design is the functional core of the website — it describes why the user would want to use it, what issue the product addresses. With user interface (UI) design, they create UX needed to retain visitors and convert them into customers — in other words, UI build narrates how of the value — how it’s expressed and presented to the user.
They figure out what the website should do and what the team should build according to guidelines that can be provided by stakeholders, UX researchers and their customer interviews, etc. Along with developers, they make the website work, make it functional, and choose the visual implementation of the product’s value that fits a user’s preferences. When you’re a UI/UX designer, your objective is to make the design of the product comfortable, make user interactions close-to-invisible, enjoyable for users, personalize user flows, etc. — in one word, make sure users will love the product.
The design starts with research. It helps a product team clarify what their users’ behaviors and needs are. Usually, as we said, it’s the job of UX researchers to do all that. In small teams, these responsibilities are handed to UI/UX designers. Then, UI/UX designers develop wireframes, UX flow, and visual elements, keeping the design course consistent with the brand. The core fundamentals of working with user experience include making sure that the product is
- Easy to find;
- Valuable, with its value rooted in solving real-world issues and challenges ;
- Accessible ;
- Wanted by users ;
- Easily usable ;
- Useful .
To confirm all that, designers in small teams conduct interviews with different segments of the potential audience, brainstorm different strategies of implementing their findings from the research into the product, and so on.
UI/UX Tools
Knowing how to use different digital tools is critical when it comes to UX/UI design. Designers always have to keep an eye on the best wireframing, prototyping, testing, and, in general, design solutions on the market.
Every UI/UX designer usually has to master graphic design software. They also must be able to use tools like Balsamiq, Invision, and Hotjar — to build wireframes and prototypes and collect feedback from the audience that is testing them. A decent knowledge of Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator is also considered a benefit.
Below, we’re reviewing the list of the tools for interface building in 2022:
Sketch
Containing over 680 plugins, it offers designers a cloud ecosystem where they can collaborate. It’s one of the most popular tools for UI/UX. Simple mechanics of coding components export, features for wireframing, prototyping, and GIF creation make it an ultimate tool for all designers. The main disadvantage is that the software is macOS-only.
Figma
Works in browsers. Everything you do within Figma is synced — one team member changes something, and it’s instantly visible for everyone participating in the project. It means people can work on the same project simultaneously and adjust to clients’ feedback instantly. This solution combines robust design plugins and bundles with prototypes, Zeplin, and Framer integrations, plus it’s possible to embed different design files. OS-agnostic.
Adobe XD
This tool is for vector graphics. UI/UX designers it throughout the whole UX design process — from early prototyping and brainstorming to making final cuts and leaving specifications for developers. With Adobe XD, designers can coedit mockups, utilize reusable UI components and prototypes. Sketch files import is available. This tool is available on Windows, macOS, and even on mobile devices powered by iOS or Android. Works great with other Adobe products.
InVision Studio
It’s a combination of different UI/UX solutions — Studio, Craft, Cloud, and Freehand. These comprise a toolkit for prototyping, across-the-team collaboration, animation, UI screens testing, and creating detailed specs. Can be integrated with other design software like Photoshop and, what’s essential, project management solutions like Jira. InVision takes some time to learn — many beginners complain the interface is incorrigible. However, designers easily catch up with its unfamiliar features thanks to multiple tutorials online.
Zeplin
This is a tool that translates UI into CSS. It can be integrated with the most popular UI/UX graphic design solutions like Sketch. It supports coediting and all the UI/UX designs can be exported in a single click. Zeplin supports the automatic generation of web development and design resources such as assets, specs, text styles, and colors.
Google Analytics
This is the top Google-powered web analytics tool that provides you with analytics about what’s happening on your website — where the users come from, what they do using your resource, etc. Google Analytics works well for gathering statistics about your webpage’s performance in terms of views, clicks, and so on. Using it, UI/UX designers get the user’s journey better.
FlowMapp
FlowMapp is a tool for UI/UX designers to outline sitemaps. It works well for project strategy building, creating the product’s information architecture, and user flow diagrams. With this tool, UI/UX designers can also manage website development progress and work together on improving the design in real-time. It can be integrated with Slack, but not with other cloud-based prototyping tools.
Balsamiq
This tool was created for rapid, low-fidelity wireframing. UI/UX designers master it quickly. Balsamiq’s library has numerous readymade wireframe elements that allow designers to have more time for design, content layout development, and adjusting to a user’s preferences. Across-the-team cloud sharing is enabled.
Bugsee
Locally records everything that the app is doing so that UI/UX designers know exactly where the user flow breaks or is deformed. Reports every crush and bug. Records info about all network traffic and console logs. It’s a mobile-based solution.
Appsee
This is a tool that focuses on mobile app analytics. Appsee is one of the first platforms for qualitative analytics. Combines a wide range of solutions like Touch Heatmaps and User Session Recordings for monitoring and optimizing apps’ performance. These, like Bugsee, can track all user interactions in real-time and figure out which UI aspects are intuitive and counter-intuitive for users.
Hotjar
This is a one-stop platform for user feedback and qualitative website analysis. This solution provides UI/UX designers with everything they need to know about their audience and the different ways it interacts with the product. Hotjar incorporates features like conversion funnels, user session recordings, feedback surveys, form analysis, and a recruitment platform for test groups of users. It allows UI/UX designers to analyze information about visitors’ moves on a website. It includes the info on how far a user scrolls down the page and where they are clicking or tapping the most. Then, UI/UX designers use this info to create the best experiences for their clients and increase conversions.
Usabilla
Platform-agnostic tool for feedback collection. Provides real-time visual tracking of user’s behavior. It also helps designers confirm the info they’ve gathered through user surveys. With Usabilla, designers can determine important customer data like NPS scores, improve design elements users are pointing to, and analyze project development progress.
There are many software suits you can choose from. Ensure that you’re making choices based on if the tool has a high level of usability, boosts collaboration between departments, and helps your team make their operations more efficient and user-focused.
How Much Does It Cost to Hire a UX Designer?
Design Project Type
Average Hourly Price Rate
Layout development
$30-$125
Visual work
$40-$90
Design of Interactions
$35-105
The UI/UX designer’s expertise, the quantity of testing needed, complexity of interface design, and information architecture, required for the product, — all impact the UI/UX designer’s final rates.
Front-end Developer
The functionality and usability of websites and apps are the main responsibilities of front-end developers. They translate all the elements of the webpage interface into code and ensure that every button brings visitors to the right place. Here are some other responsibilities of front-end developer’s position:
- ensuring website security in terms of eliminating XSS mistakes, installing output encoding, compartmentalizing, and so on;
- Implementing tech requirements for the project;
- troubleshooting and testing across multiple devices and platforms;
- developing features through the CI/CD process;
- ensuring the product performs well on all platforms.
Developers write the code to bring UX designs and ideas to life. A UI/UX developer uses languages like HTML and JavaScript.
Three chief technologies are used for front-end UI/UX development:
- HTML (helps build UX/UI elements on the screen in tables);
- CSS (helps to fill up everything with color, defines the visual style of the website including things like spacing and font);
- JavaScript (creates complex animations and user interactions and sends/receives data from the backend).
Along with back-end developers, they connect the visual presentation of the product to databases and servers, to third-party apps through APIs. Then, they, along with QA specialists, work through the product with tests to figure out if everything operates smoothly.
Front-end Developer Tools
Besides knowing programming languages, front-end developers must be familiar with top UI/UX development tools. Here is a list of tools every front-end developer should be able to use.
Chrome Developer Tools
A part of Chrome’s set of debugging solutions. This set of tools allows a UI/UX development team to conduct quick testing and loading flow optimization. It provides developers with information on what the browser is doing at any given moment. With Chrome Developer Tools, developers can view Border, Padding, and Margin characteristics.
jQuery
A popular open-source JS library. By abstracting a lot of the functionality, jQuery allows having a greater scope for document navigation, adding plugins, and creating animations. It helps engineers to concentrate more on building HTML, Ajax, and other aspects of programming.
GitHub
GitHub is the repository hosting service. With it, UI/UX developers track bugs, manage feature requests, and maintain wikis/documentation for every project. They can get updates on changes made within the coding project and return to the previous backup if something goes wrong in the current version. GitHub is also a tool for coediting, documentation sharing, and working with repositories. There’s a rich open-source community.
Twitter Bootstrap
It’s a comprehensive UI package created by Twitter. The chief benefit of Bootstrap lies in its technology for building modal objects, normalizing stylesheets, and working with JS plugins. It cuts down lines of code that are needed to build your project.
JavaScript, AngularJS
This is an open-source web application framework. It allows UI/UX developers to extend an application’s HTML syntax and work with a more readable and quick-to-develop environment. AngularJS is a part of many web specialists’ kits.
Sass
A wonderful and quick-to-set-up CSS extension language. Allows designers to nest CSS selectors, mixins, that make writing declarations simpler and less tedious, do calculations in your CSS file, and many other things that make front-ender’s lives easier.
Each of these tools can be a perfect addition to every UI/UX developer’s arsenal. Front-end development tools play a chief role in creating a responsive design that will be enjoyable and helpful for visitors.
How Much Does It Cost to Hire a Front-end Developer?
Here are average prices depending on the developer’s experience:
Type of Front-End Developer
Average Hourly Price Rate
Basic Front-End
$41-$60
Intermediate Front-End
$61-$80
Advanced Front-End
$100+
Same as hourly rates for design professionals, the cost of UI/UX development services varies.
Let’s sum up the UX/UI designer vs front-end developer” question. UX/UI designers are overseeing the way everything — including user interactions — looks within the product, while UI/UX developers make sure what designers and product managers have envisioned works as it should.
How Much Does It Cost to Develop an App?
The total cost of developing an app differs from project to project. Depending on the app’s complexity, the design process may amount to $5,000 on average. The number of screens, design, has a big impact, for instance — usually, UI/UX designers develop 11 screens for one project.
The cost for building an app from zero to a fully functional product starts from $10,000:
Complexity
Development Time/hours
Developers Cost at 50$
Basic
200-300
$10 000 - $15 000
Complex
400-600
$20 000 - $30 000
Highly Advanced
800-900
$40 000 - $45 000
Here, rates fluctuate depending on the level of the team’s experience and on the level of technical sophistication your product requires.
Can a UI/UX Designer Build a Website Alone?
With tools like Webflow and Wix, almost anyone can create a website. Today, many bloggers, photographers, resellers create websites for their brands without any programming knowledge.
However, if you want to build a complex solution that stands out with its unique user interface design and solves high-level challenges for its users, then it’s better to hire a development team.
So, Whom Do You Need to Hire?
If you want to develop software for PC, you’ll need either front- and back-end engineers and a UI/UX specialist or a designer and a full-stack programmer. If that’s the task for mobile engineering, you’ll need a programmer that develops for the mobile platform you want to release on (or a cross-platform specialist) and a designer. There are several options here: you can hire these people from freelance platforms, ask for product development services from independent agencies, or hire engineers and designers full-time.
The option that has a good proportion of quality and affordability is the second one: third-party partners would have the expertise needed for the project (don’t forget to check their portfolio before inquiring) but they won’t require as much investment as full-time employees.
As we’ve already mentioned, you can skip the engineering part of it all by using the no-code platform, too. In that case, make sure to scrutinize the platform’s security protocols and research if there are cases of data breaches connected to them.
For your MVP, it’s best to onboard a designer first: they’ll help you build workable models and prototypes of the product to help with the pitching process and provide an opportunity for you to engage first adopters early on.
Note, that it’s best to work on your business model before hiring any of these people. You can research your value proposition by yourself, study your niche, talk to your audience, and figure out if they are ready to pay for that value. Create a dummy landing page with an email field to check people’s interest, make polls on social media, etc. Ensure there is a preliminary demand for your future product. Don’t fall into the trap of inventing something no one will use, like so many startups do.
