This morning I found myself writing a long response to a question somebody posted on a design leadership Slack about the difference between UX, UI and Product Design. Yes, I know, we’re all fed up of conversations about “defining the damned thing”; something I find deeply ironic as most digital designers work in a domain where language and nuance is important. However the fact that these conversations still happen amongst us means that confusion still persists, so I thought I’d take another stab at this topic using a historical context. In order to do this I wanted to take you back to the early days of the Web.
Design and The Early Web
Early websites were generally created by a single person, leading early Web Designers to be multi-discipline individuals with a strong technical background. As Web capabilities started to allow more nuanced visual design (like improved CSS browser support), this started butting up against many Web Designers visual design abilities. At the same time this opened the door for traditional Graphic Designers who would focus on the visual design side of things. As such Web Design bifurcated into Visual Design and Front-end Development.
As sites started to get more complicated, new types of problem started to emerge, including how to structure large scale websites…
