Web development is one of the fastest growing sectors across the nation. There are millions of concepts that are playing the significant role in providing the most innovative solutions to the world.

User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) are two of the most compelling concepts in the web development sector. They both are different concepts, but individually play a crucial role in designing and developing a web-based project.

However, most of the users, especially beginners get confuse between these two concepts. It may be due to harmonious nature of UI and UX, or most of the WordPress designers and developers have mastery in both the concepts. But the fact is that UI and UX are completely different from each other. You can also say that they are two ends of the same pole. In this blog post, we will try to understand their objectives, differences, and at last how they interrelate with each other.

Let’s get started!

User Interface (UI)

User Interface or UI is the technical concept that lets the user interact with the product or technology through the icons, buttons and control options. UI displays the UX elements that have been designed to deliver the enhanced and soothing interaction with your targeted visitors.

In simple words, it embraces the tools that we humans use to interact with machines. It promotes the approach that an individual uses to control and operate the computer. There are plenty of user interfaces such as physical icons, buttons, and onscreen buttons. Plus, it includes touch controls such as touch screens and audio controls like a voice command. However, there are some of the basic requirements of an enhanced UI:

• Aesthetically pleasing
• Clean & clear
• Efficient
• Intuitive
• Consistent, and
• Forgiving

The UI designer designs such product layouts that can effectively communicate the message to the users, without any hassle. They concentrate on creating highly-interactive components including icons, buttons, typography, and a lot more that allows users to interact with your site or machine, without any distractions.

User Experience (UX)

User Experience or UX is also an important concept in the web design that defines how a user feels when he/she interacts with a site, web-based mobile app or desktop-based software. It encompasses the physical interaction – what they actually thing about the graphics, their behavior, their engagement with the site and the emotions they have while using a particular system. In other words, User experience represents the usability and accessibility of a site or an app.

The UX designers/developers who work on web projects focuses on providing the best user experience to their customers. They study and evaluate how users feel about a particular site or app. Then, they monitor multiple aspects of web design, which includes user-engagement, user-friendliness, easy and simple navigation system, utility and a lot more things within a web project.

Let’s take a look at the short history of WordPress UI and UX

Most of the modifications you have seen in the WordPress UI hit down on the backend and mainly affect the admin area or dashboard. There are lots of things that have changed such as the commenting structure that affect the end users as well. Well, it will be interesting to know the brief history of WordPress UI and UX.

• The first version of WordPress UI introduced in 2003. You will be surprised to know that the first version WP UI didn’t have a dashboard and also incorporated with limited features. It means a user could only assign one category to a post. However, the user interface was still blunt and there were not as many features as users expected from the next version of WordPress UI. It also embedded sub-categories, post previews, thumbnails, custom fields, etc within the dashboard.
• The next version of WordPress UI introduced in 2005, which brought new changes in the dashboard. It added pages and also supported multiple themes. The 2005 edition also introduced WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor and Akismet. It also incorporated image and file uploading.
• The two releases of 2007 included spell-check, a menu structure for tags, comments, update notifications for new plugins and availability of WordPress upgrade, an icon for the advanced visual editor and URL redirect.
• The 2008 version introduced plenty of updates that added a new admin panel, improvements to the visual editor, a word-count feature for the written section, one-click upgrade for plugins available in the WordPress plugin repository, an inbuilt gallery, automatic installs for plugins in the directory, comment paging, the potential to reply to comments from the admin panel, keyboard shortcuts, sticky posts and a lot more.
• The 2009 version brought in back plugin updates, an inbuilt image editor, global trash/undo, faster scripting to speed up core WordPress, simple process to embed video, the CodePress editor, one-click theme install, potential to browse the entire theme directory, drag and drop widgets in the sidebar, and much more.
• 2010 brought in API to allow developers to create customized site. An API introduced with the custom background, menus, post types, headers, taxonomies, shortlinks, etc. It also embedded MU with WordPress to allow administrators to run multiple sites from a single dashboard.
• In 2011, the WordPress UI version introduced with an advanced UIR and a full screen editor. WordPress got faster and lighter. Plus, introduced new dashboard design, which included typography, code and design.
• 2012 version popularized more improvements to the images, integrated gallery creation, and media uploading. The style for dashboard was also improved – everything as upgraded with high -resolution graphics, new color picker was embedded and a lot more.
• The 2013 version added automatic maintenance and security updates, stronger password recommendations, native support for audio and video embeds, autosave, better global support, etc.
• The version of 2014 witnessed the straightforward typography that looks beautiful of multiple mobile devices, better media management, improved image editing, header previews, gallery previews, a better distractive-free writing mode, advanced metrics for better plugin searching and browsing, a new theme browser, and live widget.

Note: WordPress has made many changes to enhance the UI for both the site owners (admin) and end users. These improvements had the objective of creating an enhanced UX while developing an effective and robust UI.

Future of WordPress UI and UX

With the introduction of new and cutting-edge technologies, it becomes essential to take some steps to further improve the UI and UX of a WordPress site. We bring you the list of most important things that you need to consider in the near future.

1. Flat User Interface

Improvisation in web design is a must. Today, nobody wants to use shadows and 3D buttons for their websites. Instead of this, the Flat design is in fashion as it is intuitive and simple. It looks amazing on multiple mobile devices and platforms.

2. Minimalism

Instead of using gaudy things that chaos the screen, you should take a minimalistic approach to design a site. It will improve the UI as well as UX of a WordPress site.

3. Scrolling

Scrolling will be more prevailing concepts in the WordPress designs. This is because more and more people making the use of mobile devices to browse or surf the site. Scrolling is a user-friendly way then clicking a button that can give a better user experience to the customers.

To an addition, scrolling is much more convenient and also improves the overall speed of a website.

4. Mobile-ready

Mobile will remain the king of the hill. We have already witnessed the advanced rendition of Windows being developed around mobile first. Google’s OS came from mobile systems. In order to convey the small screen messages, developers need to focus on large visuals instead of small text.

5. Material Design

According to Google, you should develop a single underlying system that enables for a unified experience on multiple platforms and device sizes. Mobile actions are fundamental, but touch, voice, keyboard, and mouse are top-notch input methods.

The concepts will include:

• Intentional,
• Graphic,
• Bold, and
• Motion that provides meaning.

Quick and easy navigation system is designed to allow users to navigate within a site, without any hassle. Touch targets will be 48*48 pixels. It will also support mouse free and advanced gesture navigation, so it will let you manage the focus of the end user with ease.

It will also use color to convey information, utilize a visual alternative to sound, and offer clues about special relationships.

6. Dynamic Backgrounds

With the help of background videos, you can convey the message more effectively to the end user. Therefore, the trend toward HD background visuals has increased. Website owners are making the use of dynamic backgrounds- videos, graphics or photos and this will continue. In fact, large size images and engaging videos is easier to see and easily consume on smaller screens such as mobile devices.

7. Tiles and cards

This trend will also outshine in the coming future.

There are many popular sites such as Pinterest, who are already following tiles and card trend. It looks beautiful and clean.

8. Voice Control

The trend of more motion and voice control will also witness a great popularity in web design.

9. Typography

Typography will become more visually appealing and customized that can go with individual brand-image. In fact, fonts will be selected based on image, style, mood, etc. The beautiful and captivating typography has the ability to uplift the user experience of your site, quickly and efficiently.

10. Customized UX

There are plenty of websites on the web, where content is already customized according to the customer’s behavior. But, now, it is a high time to customize the UX according to the customer’s taste and preferences. With the help of Analytics, you can see how customers use a website. You can use this information to understand and provide the customized UX to your potential web users. This will allow users to make changes according to their needs.

Wrapping up

Both the user interface and user experience plays a significant role in determining the usability, accessibility and functionality of a WordPress site. It becomes essential to treat both the concepts deliberately.

Well, in this blog post, we explained the quick evolution of UI and UX in the Web design world, how they interrelate to each other, history of WordPress UI and UX and their future in web design and development.

If you want to host a successful site, you need to enhance the user experience of your site and for that, you need to develop an advanced and robust user interface because it is the prominent aspect that can help you grab more visitors.

Hopefully, you liked this blog post. You can also share your views on how to further improve the UI and UX of a website.