I often hear a lot of product design professionals splitting hairs on the difference between UI and UX. The difference is subtle, and honestly shouldn’t matter to anyone not in the biz; a great product is a combination of the two. But here’s a simple story that illustrates the difference.
I need a new desk lamp. Something tall enough that reaches over my monitor and lights my face for all those Teams meetings. I hopped on Amazon and searched ‘stainless steel desk lamp.’ I got dozens of results. I scanned through the first few pages, opening up 3 new tabs for ones I thought looked fine. The thing that was most important to me was the height. But despite a consistently laid out detail page, it was near impossible to figure out if each lamp would reach above my monitor.
All the while, I was having to navigate through images that were poorly photoshopped and product descriptions written in cringey English.
I decided to change gears a little, and change my search term to “streaming key light.” Holy smokes, it was even worse. More products to sort through. More variables. Does this light plug into the wall or is it USB? Does it come with a stand?
I looked at the clock, and to my amazement I had spent 2 hours….looking at lamps.
Then I thought - ‘I wonder if Costco has something that might work?’ So I grabbed my keys and drove to Costco like a caveman. Yep, they had a nice lamp that was tall enough, looked nice enough and I trust Costco not to sell me something that might burn my house down. I was home in less than hour, got a few other essentials and a hot dog to boot.
So what did Amazon do wrong? Their design has been great and unchanged for years. Nicely laid out, uniform spacing, consistent and cohesive. I knew where to look for things like price and how long it’d take to get it. But it was simply so tedious to figure out the other things I needed to know about the lamps that I couldn’t pull the trigger on any of them. The total user experience ended up being awful.
The biggest issue is that they’ve let their partners run amuck with the content on the product detail pages. The broken English and poor photo quality totally undermined my confidence to make a buying decision. I’d never heard of any of the brand names. There were waaay too many options, all with 4.5 star reviews that I know aren’t genuine. Unless I’ve seen an in depth 3rd party review on another site for that exact model number or a friend or influencer has referred me to it, it’s become really annoying to evaluate the quality of anything on Amazon.
Costco on the other hand solved all those same problems. Because I could touch it and even bring home today for the same price as the ones I was looking at on Amazon. Costco’s built a reputation on only carrying quality products and my decision making is even easier because they only ever show me at most 3 options.
Good product design isn’t simply about making the thing look pretty (UI Design) - it’s the culmination of the total end user experience (UX Design).