The difference between web design and UX design explained

When it comes to building effective products, websites, or apps, web design and user experience (UX) design should work together as complementary elements of the same strategy—but there are clear differences between how each field approaches design.

In this chapter of our web design guide, we dive into the differences between web design and UX design and point out the subtle nuances between the two. With a clear understanding of how each role fits within an organization—and contributes to its goals—you’ll see more clearly which duties belong to the UX design team and which are better suited for the web design team.

What is web design?

Web design is the process of planning, creating, and presenting the front-end design of a website. It may encompass several aspects, including web page layout, content production, and graphic design.

Within an organization, the purpose of web design is to generate the aesthetically pleasing structure and content of the user-facing website.

What are the goals of web design?

The ultimate goal of web design is to

• Create the basic elements of branding that make a site beautiful and visually compelling

• Accentuate and complement a company’s brand, product, or service as it’s presented to the user

• Incorporate the latest developments in HTML, CSS, and other coding languages into the design of the website to improve functionality

What are the responsibilities of a web designer?

A web designer—a professional who generates content for a website—is responsible for designing the layout of a website using various creative, technical, and process-related systems. 

Often, web designers will work on front-end development, while a web developer focuses on the back-end. They deal with the process of creating static designs like landing pages, created specifically to be rendered and viewed in a web browser. 

Web design is more than just graphic design. These professionals have to consider functionality, technical constraints, digital trends, and user expectations—all of which change frequently—to address and resolve web design challenges.

Web design typically involves several visual components, including

• Graphic design

• Creative conceptualization

• Front-end coding

• Webpage layout

• Content production

• Search engine optimization (SEO)

• HTML/CSS Programming

On a day-to-day basis, a web designer’s specific responsibilities depend on what their client, employer, or project requires. Their activities might involve collaborating with departments like

• Product teams, to design the front-end of a website by creating visual brand elements and graphics, and build templates to streamline their work

• Marketing and customer support teams, to create written content for specific website pages and sections

• Development teams, to code the front-end of a website in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

As far as deliverables go, web designers are responsible for projects like

• Sitemaps

• Content inventory

• Sketches

• Low- and high-fidelity mockups

What is UX design?

UX design is the process of building products that are useful, easy, and enjoyable for people to use. UX considers every interaction a user has with a product or service, and optimizes it.

If we consider web design as a broad umbrella category, then UX and user interface (UI) design are specialties of it. 

Within an organization, the purpose of UX design is to consider how a product, app, or website experience makes the user feel, how an interface looks, and how easy it is for the user to accomplish their goals.

What are the goals of UX design?

The goals of UX design are to

• Introduce features or benefits in a way that is relevant to the user

• Compile every UX and UI design element and turn it into a highly-functional and efficient product that people can easily interact with

• Create efficient, relevant, and pleasant experiences for users, to encourage adoption, retention, and loyalty

What are the responsibilities of a UX designer?

A UX designer’s job begins and ends with the user. They're responsible for examining user behavior in a site, service, or app, and optimizing the design to encourage certain behaviors and create a more conducive atmosphere.

UX involves iteration, in which user feedback is applied to incremental changes and improvements over time. It's a process of coming up with ideas and testing hypotheses based on real users' input. 

A UX designer considers how the experience makes the user feel, and how easy it is to achieve the desired result. To do so, they employ UX methods like user research, information architecture, interaction design, usability testing, and content strategy.

Along with the aesthetics of the product, service, or website, UX designers focus on utility and functionality. They might be responsible for

• Determining the information architecture of a digital product

• Strategy development, based on user research and user testing

• Finalizing the right interaction model

• Creating personas through user surveys 

• Building prototypes

• Testing prototypes and user experiences

• Collaborating with UI designers to create attractive and useful designs

UX design focuses on the end user in order to understand their habits, needs, behaviors, motivations, and emotions. It’s a social, analytical, and storytelling skill set that often involves working on tasks like

• Performing user research and optimizing user experience

• Conducting market research to establish goals for the website and its pages

• Understanding user psychology

• Comprehending product specification

• Creating user personas

• Designing wireframes and user flows

The goal is to figure out the best way for the user to interact with the product, complete tasks, and reach their intended outcome in the easiest and most enjoyable way possible. UX designers must also work within teams to meet the needs of the stakeholders involved. This can involve cross-functional collaboration with

• Product teams, to continuously refine the product experience so it becomes easier for users as the product develops

• Development teams, to implement validated changes and optimizations that improve the user experience

• Marketing, support, design, and other teams, to share user data and feedback cross-functionally, collaborate on any big UX design changes, and keep other teams in the loop

While they may be asked to bend to required business or marketing needs, UX designers are always mindful to not break the central connection to their users and user needs, delivering on projects like

• User interviews and surveys

• User personas

• User journey maps

• User scenarios

• Analytics reports

• Sketches

• Wireframes and prototypes

💡 Pro tip: practice real UX design by getting feedback from actual users.

To prototype and iterate on design solutions, you have to deeply understand the problem and who you’re designing for.

Talk to your users, get them to tell you about their problems and experiences, and use their direct feedback to come up with possible optimizations.

Use Contentsquare’s Voice of Customer to collect insights from users at scale and in context. Through Surveys and feedback widgets, users can

• Rate their level of satisfaction

• Describe their experience using certain web pages and elements (such as product images and descriptions, buttons, headlines, checkout page)

• Screenshot a specific page element to provide context and details

Want to dive even deeper? Jump straight from a survey response to the associated session replay to watch what happened before and after the user left their feedback, giving you an even better understanding of their experience. 

Capture feedback as users browse your website to get actionable insights that improve your UX

What do web design and UX design have in common?

A product, service, or website design not only includes how things look, but also how they work. Aside from the basic elements of branding and web design that make it visually appealing and compelling, a product should always be user-friendly. 

Let’s look at some aspects of web design that can also be found in UX design.

An affinity for problem-solving

Both web design and UX design use problem-solving as a mechanism for achieving specific goals.

Web designers look to solve problems for their customers, employer, or clients. After they identify the issue, they design a web solution and work with other teams to develop and test the site before releasing it. Then, they collect user feedback and continue to reiterate the design after the site is launched.

UX designers look to solve problems for their users. It’s a similar iterative problem-solving process that begins with user research—getting to know potential users, what their problems are, and how to solve them. Then, UX designers often use an approach like design thinking to create a solution that addresses the users' key needs, and then bring the prototype back to users to test its validity or usability.

Considering the user journey

Both web and UX designers consider the user journey when creating and building the product design.

Depending on the project, client, or employer, each of these roles might be responsible for different aspects of the user flow. While web design deals with how the website will look, UX design considers what the user experience will be with specific elements.

💡 Pro tip: use on-site UX surveys to understand the user journey, without disrupting it.

On-site surveys typically pop up or slide in from the edge of the page with 1–3 quick open-ended questions. You can trigger on-site surveys to appear only on some pages or after a certain action, which makes them perfect for gathering feedback on specific elements of your product.

Launch and analyze surveys in Contentsquare to get valuable UX and web design feedback from real users

Creativity based on emotional design

Emotional design—the concept of creating designs that evoke emotions and result in positive user experiences—is a critical part of both web and UX design.

Web designers create designs that elicit emotions from users with visual design elements such as fonts, imagery, and typography. Considering most decisions come from emotion and gut instinct, it makes sense the design of a website can encourage conversion and retention behaviors.

UX designers are also concerned with evoking emotions from users throughout their entire experience of using a product. They draw a lot from graphic design principles—like creating a predictable visual flow across the screen and placing calls to action (CTAs) in the right spots—while also factoring in additional concerns like interactivity and timing.

What are the differences between web design and UX design?

Web design and UX design are not interchangeable, and there are marked differences between the two. These 3 principles of web design vs. UX design show how each field addresses core issues. 

Main focus

In web design, the main focus is creating great websites for the internet. A web designer leans on technology—the latest versions of coding languages and web browsers—to keep up with the specs required for modern dynamic and responsive designs, as well as the latest browser requirements.

UX design, on the other hand, stays focused on the users. UX designers focus on research to gather insights and perform optimizations that cater to specific user needs. Technology is still involved, but mostly as a means for users to get what they need. Their ultimate goal is to meet users’ requirements, rather than web browser ones.

Platform

The domain of web design is strictly tied to web browsers used on desktops and mobile devices.

On the other hand, UX design is platform independent and can be applied to almost anything that relies on human interaction—mobile apps, video games, desktop software, and even retail spaces. 

Strategy

Web design doesn’t tend to adopt the human-focused strategy of UX design. Instead, a web designer might emphasize more of the aesthetics of the site, rather than how a user might deal with it.

This is most obvious when addressing common issues, like slow loading times. If a page takes too long to load, a web designer might compress files and adjust page content to trim excess and save bandwidth. A UX designer will focus more on the likelihood that a user will bounce, how to improve interactivity, and address the loading time on the most important pages, before addressing the problem site-wide.

UX design is defined by coordinating continuous improvements by interacting with users, learning from their experiences, and applying insights to build a better product. The web design process doesn’t dive as deep and will, in general, be less iterative.

How do web design and UX design work together?

Say a company is looking to design a product, but they’re not sure who their target market is—or how to reach them. Before software or web design begins, UX designers and researchers will generate user personas and develop a strategy to create an experience that helps users achieve their goals within the product.

As the design comes to life, interactive prototypes or simple static wireframes are created. Then, usability testing is conducted by navigating through the prototype and deciding where to make assessments and adjustments to functionality. 

Next, a web designer takes all the information available about the product and brand—like the look, feel, and features—and creates a site that introduces the product’s benefits. 

This may involve gathering screenshots, creating graphics and illustrations, generating content and copy for the site, and incorporating other visual assets. They’re also mindful of how the website will look and behave on different device sizes and browsers, as part of a responsive, adaptive design.

After the design is completed and before launch, it’s time for further testing and web development decisions, including how the website will be coded, where the graphic assets and web files will live, and how they'll be delivered.

Next steps in nailing your design

How you incorporate web design and UX design in your organization depends on your company’s unique needs, goals, and challenges. 

Each field addresses different problems, but they can (and should) work together to create a better product for your users.

FAQs about web design and UX design