The School of Communications faculty members published new research analyzing more than 3,200 LinkedIn job postings to clarify how U.S. employers distinguish between UX and UI design roles. Their findings reveal overlapping competencies but highlight key differences in skillsets, responsibilities, and tool usage between the two fields.
Qian Xu, professor of strategic communications and AJ Fletcher Professor, and Jenny Jiang, assistant professor of communication design, recently published research that clarifies the frequently misunderstood distinctions between user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) design roles in the U.S. job market. Their study, titled “UX Design vs. UI Design: Understanding U.S. Employers’ Expectations Through Semantic Analysis of Job Descriptions,” provides valuable insights for job seekers, educators and hiring managers in the digital communication industry.
Published in Communication Design Quarterly, the research employed text mining and semantic analysis to analyze 3,269 job listings on LinkedIn. The study reveals how employers define and differentiate these two closely related yet distinct fields.
“One of the persistent challenges in the digital communication industry has been inconsistent terminology and unclear role definitions,” Xu said. “Our research offers data-driven clarity, helping align industry expectations with educational programs and career development paths for our students.”
Key findings from this study include:
- UX and UI design jobs are interconnected in terms of job titles, seniority levels, industry types, and expectations for competencies such as soft skills and proficiency in tools like Figma, a popular prototyping platform.
- Distinctions between the two roles emerge in the desired skills, like research, development, coding, and background knowledge, and familiarity with specific tools for analytics and programming.
- UX design positions emphasize strategic deliverables, whereas UI design positions focus on specific interface elements and development-related artifacts.
The complete study is available here.
Communication Design Quarterly (CDQ) is a peer-reviewed journal published by the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) Special Interest Group for Design of Communication (SIGDOC). It publishes research from various humanistic and social scientific disciplines to examine how communication can be designed more effectively.