UX encompasses all the interactions that a user has with a company’s product, service and web applications. UX is a methodology that’s driven by emotional research to understand everything that a user thinks – their mental models, their behaviours, their needs and goals. UX is about mapping the user’s journey to complete a task from start to finish, understanding any pain points and creating effective solutions in the form of prototypes. UX is about testing these prototypes to find out what works and what doesn’t work, then iterating the design until an optimum user experience is achieved.
UI is all about the visual interactions that a company has between a company’s product, service and web applications. UI is all about the aesthetics and creating visually pleasing user experiences. UI is all about the colour palettes, typography, language, icons, buttons, call-to-actions and the way the user navigates through an experience perhaps through scrolling, swiping or via voice commands. UI is driven by a style guideline in the form of an online design system in order to create high-standard consistency and thus increasing the quality of the experience for the user.
To summarise, UX focuses on the way something functions, the way the user feels and their overall experience. Whereas UI is all about aesthetics and creating visually pleasing visual interactions.
Martin Gamble 
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