I still remember those days, when I was a soon-to-be graphic design graduate who started to question what my future will be. At that time, I realized that I loved graphic design, but I wasn’t sure if I enjoyed doing it. Creating logos, posters, brochures, and packagings might be fun, but it felt unsatisfying — not knowing if what I work on is meaningful for other people or not. So I started looking for ways to expand my skill set, and look for other opportunities.

我仍然记得那些日子，那时我是即将毕业的图形设计专业的毕业生，开始质疑我的未来。 那时，我意识到自己喜欢图形设计，但是不确定自己是否喜欢图形设计。 创建徽标，海报，小册子和包装可能很有趣，但是感觉并不令人满意-不知道我的工作对其他人是否有意义。 因此，我开始寻找扩展技能的方法，并寻找其他机会。

Thankfully and unexpectedly, my first internship landed me a UI designer role. And that was my beginning in the product design industry.

幸运的是，我的第一次实习让我成为了UI设计师。 那就是我在产品设计行业的起点。

In product design, we, designers, are expected to put user needs as our base in designing — which I like. While UI designers are more concerned with the look, interaction, and the feel of a product, UX designers are responsible for making the product easy to use. Both work together as a team to create products that’ll help people fulfilling their needs.

在产品设计中，我们(设计师)希望将用户需求作为我们设计的基础，这是我喜欢的。 UI设计人员更加关注产品的外观，交互和感觉，而UX设计人员则负责使产品易于使用。 两者作为一个团队一起工作，以创建可帮助人们满足其需求的产品。

After spending a few years as a UI designer, I found myself getting more interested in how people think and interact with a certain product rather than how it looks like. For me, it’s interesting when I hear people complain about a feature or a product — it makes me want to understand the problem more, find out what the root cause is, and think about a possible solution.

在担任UI设计人员几年后，我发现自己对人们如何思考某种产品并与之交互而不是其外观变得更加感兴趣。 对我来说，当我听到人们抱怨某个功能或产品时，这很有趣–它使我想更多地了解问题，找出根本原因，并思考可能的解决方案。

Realizing that, after some considerations, I decided to switch to UX design.

意识到这一点，经过一些考虑，我决定切换到UX设计。

UI和UX实际上是什么 (What UI and UX Actually Are)

When I was a UI designer, explaining to people what I did was already difficult. I always summarize it to something like “designing websites and apps interfaces”. Now, when I switch to UX design, people keep asking, “You changed jobs? What’s the difference? You’re not designing websites and apps anymore?” Then I would answer, “Yes, I still do, but..”

当我是UI设计师时，向人们解释我所做的事情已经很困难。 我总是将其总结为“ 设计网站和应用程序界面”之类的内容。 现在，当我转向UX设计时，人们不断问： “您换工作了吗？ 有什么不同？ 您不再设计网站和应用了吗？” 然后我会回答： “是的，我仍然这样做，但是..”

After being asked multiple times, I think about an example that people can easily understand and imagine. I came up with this example: “My mom is a non-tech savvy mobile user, and it takes quite a while to teach her to use an app or feature she isn’t familiar with. My job is to make an app that even my mom can easily use & get familiar with it.” Or just in short: “I make technology easier to use.” Is that explaining enough? Well, at least I hope so.

经过多次询问，我想到了一个人们可以轻松理解和想象的例子。 我举了一个例子： “我的妈妈是一个非技术类移动用户，要花很长时间教她使用她不熟悉的应用或功能。 我的工作是制作一个即使我妈妈也可以轻松使用并熟悉的应用程序。” 或简而言之： “我使技术更易于使用。” 这足以解释吗？ 好吧，至少我希望如此。

In fact, many people have misconceptions that assume UI and UX roles are just the same. But based on my experience, what differentiates me as a UI and UX designer the most is the way I think when approaching a problem. As a UI designer, I tend to jump to a solution first, before trying to understand the problem. While as a UX designer, I (am encouraged to) ask questions and deepen the understanding of the problem first, before anything else. To change this way of thinking might be a lot of work to do since I am used to it, but I realized that this is the first thing to start with if you want to add some UX skills to your current UI skills — that I’m also still learning about.

实际上，许多人误以为UI和UX角色是相同的。 但是根据我的经验，作为UI和UX设计师最让我与众不同的是解决问题时的思考方式。 作为UI设计师，我倾向于先尝试解决方案，然后再尝试理解问题。 作为UX设计师，我(很受鼓舞)首先提出问题并加深对问题的理解。 自从习惯以来，改变这种思维方式可能需要做很多工作，但是我意识到，如果要在当前的UI技能中添加一些UX技能，这是第一件事。我还在学习。

To give a brief explanation about UI and UX, I can illustrate it like this:

为了简要介绍UI和UX，我可以这样说明：

To create a good UX, it is important to get a full understanding of the problem, see-through different angles, and get a clear context first. Only after that, can we go through the UX process to achieve the solution that UI will help to visualize. Even though the starting point of UI is on the solution, but a good UI takes an important role too to facilitate interactions between users and the product.

要创建一个好的UX，重要的是要充分了解问题，透视不同的角度，并首先获得清晰的上下文。 只有在那之后，我们才能完成UX流程，以实现UI有助于可视化的解决方案。 尽管UI的起点就在解决方案上，但是良好的UI也起着重要的作用，以促进用户与产品之间的交互。

What to keep in mind is that a great solution will only be able to be achieved as long as we have a good understanding of the problem first. That means, without a great UX and UI, you won’t achieve a great solution for users.

要记住的是，只有我们首先对问题有一个很好的理解，才能实现一个好的解决方案。 这意味着，如果没有出色的UX和UI，您将无法为用户提供出色的解决方案。

用户体验有用的UI技能 (Useful UI Skills for UXers)

That being said, even though UI and UX designers may acquire different skill sets, it doesn’t mean that my experience as a UI designer doesn’t help me in my UX role. These are some UI skills that will benefit you as a UXer based on my experience:

话虽如此，即使UI和UX设计师可能掌握不同的技能，但这也不意味着我作为UI设计师的经验不会对我的UX角色有所帮助。 根据我的经验，以下一些UI技能将使您作为UXer受益：

• Familiar with the software — while UX won’t necessarily need skill on software (you can even start on paper sketches), but a prior knowledge to Figma, Sketch, Adobe XD, or any other prototyping tools will surely help you in creating better wire flows and wireframes that you can present to your stakeholders.

  熟悉软件 -尽管UX不一定不需要软件技能(您甚至可以开始绘制纸质草图)，但是对Figma，Sketch，Adobe XD或任何其他原型工具的先验知识肯定会帮助您创建更好的导线您可以向涉众展示的流程和线框。

• Team collaboration — to create a great product, a collaboration between the product, product design, and technology team is unavoidable. As a UI designer, you may already have experienced this kind of collaboration when you received briefs from the product team, or when you delivered the design to the developers. This teamwork experience is a great asset that not everyone has experienced before.

  团队协作 —要创建出色的产品，产品，产品设计和技术团队之间的协作是不可避免的。 作为UI设计师，当您收到产品团队的简介或将设计交付给开发人员时，您可能已经经历了这种协作。 这种团队合作经验是并非所有人都曾经经历过的一项宝贵财富。

• Continuous exploration & iteration — designers tend to feel unsatisfied about what they have made already. It always feels something’s still missing and can be improved, and we always try to change or add something to it (but turns out to undo it back again at the final thought, who’s with me?). This not-easily-satisfied habit can either be good or vice versa, but just take the good side that it will help us to always recheck our work and strive to give the best in everything we work on. In UX iteration, it will always be good to involve other team members into your thought process. That way you can get different perspectives, and get a bigger picture of the problem.

  持续的探索和迭代 -设计师往往会对自己已经完成的工作感到不满意。 它总是感觉有些东西仍在丢失并且可以改进，我们总是尝试更改或添加一些东西(但是最终的想法还是想撤消它，谁在跟我在一起？)。 这种不容易满足的习惯可能是好习惯，反之亦然，但是只要善于一方，它将有助于我们始终重新检查我们的工作，并努力在我们所做的一切事情中都做到最好。 在UX迭代中，最好让其他团队成员参与您的思考过程。 这样，您可以得到不同的见解，并从更大角度了解问题。

• Feedbacks make you shine — you may sometimes hate receiving (another) feedback after a lot of iteration. You may think that your work has already reached its maximum quality. But later on, you will then realize that there will always be a dark room of improvement that you didn’t notice before, and that feedback from other perspectives is what makes you shine and lighten up the room. Visual design feedback tends to be more subjective as it is correlated to people’s tastes. But UX design feedbacks may be more objective — focusing on how to produce the best solution and not the visual. Therefore, you will need strong reasoning on every decision point you make.

  反馈使您大放异彩 –有时您可能会讨厌经过多次迭代后收到(另一个)反馈。 您可能认为您的作品已经达到最高质量。 但是随后，您将意识到总会有一个黑暗的改进空间，您之前从未注意到过，而来自其他角度的反馈正是使您发光并照亮整个房间的原因。 视觉设计反馈往往更加主观，因为它与人们的品味相关。 但是，UX设计反馈可能更客观-着重于如何产生最佳解决方案，而不是视觉效果。 因此，您将需要对每个决策点进行充分的推理。

• Pixel perfect queen (or king) — when in UI you pay attention to the details of each design component, in UX you will pay attention to every detail of the solution. You’ll think carefully about every corner case possible, many what-ifs, and another plus, you can also give some opinions while reviewing the UI, from a UI perspective.

  像素完美皇后 (或王者) —在UI中，您关注每个设计组件的细节，而在UX中，您将关注解决方案的每个细节。 您将仔细考虑所有可能出现的极端情况，许多假设情况以及其他优点，同时，您还可以从UI角度对UI进行审查时给出一些意见。

While there are still a lot of things and qualities that differentiate UI designers from UXers, what I shared above is just some points in my experience to bolster you UI designers that maybe are thinking about switching roles. Keep in mind that we have these base points to start with.

尽管仍有很多东西和品质使UI设计器与UXer有所不同，但我在上面分享的只是我的经验中的一些要点，以支持可能正在考虑切换角色的UI设计器。 请记住，我们有这些基本要点。

Learning is a never-ending process, and as someone who’s also new in this UX field, there are still a lot of things I need to learn. One thing for sure, hard work never fails us. All you need is the motivation to work on it, and you’ll be on your way!

学习是一个永无止境的过程，作为这个UX领域的新人，我还有很多事情需要学习。 可以肯定的是，努力工作永远不会使我们失败。 您所需要的只是进行这项工作的动力，您将一路顺风！