What’s the difference between UX and UI?

Left Brain, meet Right Brain.

For any experience to truly connect with people, it must engage both halves of their brain. Now, we understand that this mythical separation of domain between the right and left hemispheres of the brain is more rooted in pop culture than science, but it is still an apt framework for this discussion. While some like to say UX and UI are two sides of the same coin, I think it’s more apt to call them two halves of the same brain. The analytical versus the aesthetic. The data versus the qualia. The objective versus the subjective. You get the idea. But what does that mean for how we might understand the individual disciplines themselves?

Analogy time—UX is to architect as UI is to interior designer.

Let’s imagine the UX and UI designers of your digital design project are instead tasked with a bathroom remodel. The room is stripped to the studs. Without getting too graphic, we all understand that any bathroom must provide people with access to a number of critical functions. But the permutations of how the bathroom itself is laid out or how it appears, aesthetically, are virtually infinite. 

The UX designer creates a blueprint.

In doing so, they will address some basic design questions. What goes where? How much space does each activity require? What should be closest to the door? Is there a logical flow from one area to the next? Should everything be visible the moment one arrives, or should some areas be obscured? How do we arrange water supply lines and drains to maximize utility while minimizing construction costs? Where do we need storage and with what do we fill it?

In UX design, the analog to that floor plan would be a wireframe. Wireframes are the blueprint. They document the structural design and how the experience is optimized and arranged to serve a predetermined set of goals or conversions. Wireframes are the graphical representation of the relative importance and hierarchy of elements, how those elements relate, what needs to be stored in those elements and what the logical flow should be between them.

The UI designer does the finish work.

If we’re staying with the bathroom analogy, the UI designer’s decisions dictate mostly how the bathroom feels. Paint colors. Material finishes. Fixtures. Sounds. Scents. At first blush, these seem superficial, but they actually make a substantive difference to how, or if, the experience elicits a proper response. So what does UI mean in our digital design world? 

While the UX designer’s wireframes may provide broad guidelines as to what should appear on a screen and the interaction flow, the UI designer creates the actual screens, layouts, visual patterns and content and style guides that document the required family of UI elements like tone of voice, content length, buttons, icons, scrolls, menu styles, micro-animations, colors, typefaces, etc.

Both work best when considered and developed in tandem.

Of course, every digital property should work well and look and feel beautiful. But the best way to evaluate whether a design is successful is to understand whether or not it is achieving its objective. That objective may be to increase a business KPI (number of form fills, sales leads generated, etc.) or overall engagement levels like time on site, number of articles read, pages visited, etc. To maximize either, or any combination in between, requires a coordinated effort across all disciplines. 

Consumer expectations for the quality of their digital experiences are increasing. Only by understanding and engaging with people logically, intellectually and emotionally will UX and UI professionals create a competitive advantage through design.

Three AI Fueled Startups You Should Create Right Now

Three AI Fueled Startups You ShouldCreate Right Now

Get your pitch decks ready.

Part of my job is helping companies translate what they know about trends and emerging technologies into potential business ideas. So, when I see a veritable buffet of dramatic technology demos and research breakthroughs making the rounds on social media, my mind starts extending those technologies into startup ideas. Here are three interesting technologies and three accompanying products I expect someone to create, so why not you?

No repeat stock photo models.

If you haven’t already, click on over to thispersondoesnotexist.com. When you do, you’ll be greeted with a single human face. Refresh the page, and you’ll see yet another human face (see the three images below). The interesting thing is that none of these faces belong to actual human beings. They are all created from a deep learning algorithm. Are they perfect? No. At times, you’ll notice strange artifacts as the algorithm misinterprets inputs from its source photos, like bike helmets, and forges them into something akin to hair in the new generative face.

If you’re a user of stock photos, all too often you’ll realize just after you’ve rolled out a creative work, banner ad, or piece of collateral featuring that perfect smiling stock photo model, that the same model, if not the exact shot, has been used ad infinitum (pun intended) in the market. Case in point, http://asianstockphotogirl.tumblr.com.

Now, if you could create a service or an app that lets marketers save or repeatedly tune certain parameters of the algorithm, in real time, to generate multiple instances of the same face, perhaps in different angles, etc. Suddenly you have a never-ending resource of spokesmodels that will never age, and never be duplicated in someone else’s campaign.

Extend that technology out a few years, and one can imagine being able to describe a shot you need, complete with settings, subjects and situations, and have that“photo” generated on demand. Just download and use. No shoot fees. No residuals.

The Content Generator Bot.

Last week, the researchers at OpenAI—the artificial intelligence think tank founded by (but no longer run by) Elon Musk—published a paper relating the results of an exercise where they “trained a large-scale unsupervised language model which generates coherent paragraphs of text” based solely on two lines of provided copy. Here’s an alarmingly convincing example:

SYSTEM PROMPT (HUMAN-WRITTEN)

A train carriage containing controlled nuclear materials was stolen in Cincinnati today. Its whereabouts are unknown.

MODEL COMPLETION (MACHINE-WRITTEN, FIRST TRY)

The incident occurred on the downtown train line, which runs from Covington and Ashland stations.

In an email to Ohio news outlets, the U.S. Department of Energy said it is working with the Federal Railroad Administration to find the thief.

“The theft of this nuclear material will have significant negative consequences on public and environmental health, our workforce and the economy of our nation,” said Tom Hicks, the U.S. Energy Secretary, in a statement. “Our top priority is to secure the theft and ensure it doesn’t happen again.”

The stolen material was taken from the University of Cincinnati’s Research Triangle Park nuclear research site, according to a news release from Department officials.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission did not immediately release any information.

According to the release, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Material Safety and Security is leading that team’s investigation.

“The safety of people, the environment and the nation’s nuclear stockpile is our highest priority,” Hicks said. “We will get to the bottom of this and make no excuses.

Source: https://blog.openai.com/better-language-models/#sample2

It’s an amazing feat of machine-learning agility, to be sure. But it also strikes us as an amazing tool for the content marketing crowd. Imagine drafting your editorial calendar for the year, writing the first lines of each story, then having the AI generate at least the first drafts thereafter.

As someone who drafts between 30k and 50k words every year, I can tell you that the thought of even using the output as a kind of enriched thought starter every week would be amazing. The only roadblock to this startup dream is that, as of now, OpenAI thinks this technology is so convincing, that in the era of fake news, it’s perhaps too dangerous to release to the public at large.

AI-only eSports league/streaming channel (A.K.A. Twitch for bots).

We’ve watched machine learning AI defeat chess grandmasters. DeepMind’s AlphaZero mastered the “un-masterable”—the game of Go. And, of course, we all have fond memories of IBM’s Watson trouncing its human opponents at Jeopardy. But the news of late show AI is beginning to master more real-time gaming, like Star Craft 2.

And what’s most interesting about these latest game playing exploits is there action from chess masters watching AlphaZero playing chess, using words like“creative” and “elegant.” That’s because the latest iterations of game playingAI derive their playing styles not from a predetermined set of rules supplied by the programming team, but by learning more like a human, simply by trial and error, divining strategies by repeated play against, well, itself or the previous generation AI.

Given that popularity of game streaming media, like Twitch.tv, stems at least partially from the enjoyment people get from watching creative and elegant gameplay, watching two “unbeatable” AI bots duking it out in something like Fortnight would be pretty entertaining. Imagine, a fully-automated content generation machine. Once set up, the cost of incremental content is virtually zero.

If you can’t beat ‘em, employ ‘em.

Any given day you can find an article delivering a message of fear around the advances of AI and the impact it will have on industries. My philosophy is that with a little creativity and foresight, the opportunities should outweigh the concerns.

Who Owns Your Company’s Website—Marketing or IT?

Most web governance structures place marketing and IT at odds.

In many organizations we work with, IT has full control of the website—everything from the user experience, tech stack specification and implementation, and digital road map to the data that feeds it all. And Marketing is relegated to the role of being allowed to “paint” what IT provides. In these organizations, we often hear complaints that IT, “doesn’t understand,” and that Marketing is always saying, “no.”And just as often, Marketing owns the website. Driven by wanting to launch timely promotions or content or engage their audience segments in new and interesting ways, Marketing can sometimes, even with the best of intentions, leave IT in the unfortunate position of trying to build a user experience that either the available data or tech stack doesn’t support. In these organizations, we often hear complaints that Marketing, “doesn’t understand,” and that IT is always saying, “no.”

Neither of these scenarios is ideal and each leaves frustration on all sides.

As an experience design and strategy firm with expertise on both sides of the issue, we have more often than not found ourselves being the bridge or conduit between IT and Marketing. We become the great arbitrator—helping marketing understand what experiences are possible within limitations of the company’s current tech infrastructure, and helping IT understand the competitive value of pushing technology to deliver exceptional user experiences. While we’re happy to fill this role—and have made a great number of clients happy by doing so— we believe there is a better way.

Start by asking the right questions.

Stop asking who owns your company’s website and start asking what impact can improving your company’s digital presence have on the business. Imagine building and presenting a business case around what impact your company’s digital presence can have on the bottom line. And really, it’s the business that owns the website, not IT or Marketing. It’s time to push beyond a traditional IT vs. Marketing mentality in order to thrive in this ever-evolving digital environment.

It’s time for a dedicated innovation team to “own” the digital experience.

Whether it’s beginning to sound like a cliché or not, digital disruption is radically impacting every industry. This disruption is being fueled by digital transformation. It just might change the goal from getting it done, to making it better.Often innovation/R&D teams own the future-facing product or service development, but it’s not a stretch to have this group, or a similar group structure, own the future-facing customer experience. We believe this would not only solve the “age-old question” of ownership, but also better position your company to be prepared for the future.

So how do you make this switch?

It starts with building a business case and showing examples of how digital disruption can better position the company and provide a tangible ROI. The ultimate “ask” should be for a business charter—and funding—to lead a dedicated multi-disciplined team with success measures around deepening the relationship between your company and your customers and driving business metrics.   Finally, here’s one stat to help you get started: according to Harvard Business School1, leading digital companies generate better gross margins (55%), better earnings and better net income than organizations in the bottom quarter of digital adopters (37% gross margins). How’s that for ROI?1 https://www.cio.com/article/3149977/digital-transformation/8-top-digital-transformation-stories-of-2016.html