SportsArt Blog

Whether you’ve heard the terms UX (User Experience) or UI (User Interface) or not, I can assure you that you’re all too familiar with both. UI, or User Interface, is what you see when you look at a piece of technology. It can be the way the layout and colors appear on an iPhone, or how the channel guide looks on your cable TV box. It’s the interface that you use to interact with any and every bit of tech that pops up in daily life. Love the way your bank’s website looks? UI. You have a preference for the way Candy Crush uses specific shapes and colors over similar match 3 games... Yep. UI. The user interface touches a nerve with our creative minds and draws us in with clean design, attractive colors, and how things generally appear to the user.

Heading into IHRSA, I was really looking forward to seeing what was coming from all of the manufacturers regarding user interface on cardio equipment. The industry has been focusing hard on user interface in the past few years so this show was a good litmus test. As I walked the floor and saw what other companies had to offer, it really made it obvious why the mainstream technology industry thinks fitness equipment has some of the worst user interfaces in the world.

User Experience (UX) is the king of the kingdom. It's what can make a mediocre product exceptional, and a great product terrible. The mistake is thinking just about the product itself, and not about how people around it are going to interact with it. It's also a common misconception that User Interface (UI) is the same as UX. While they definitely work together, they're not the same. UI is the new Ferrari sitting at a racetrack; UX is the feeling you get when you drive the Ferrari around the track. UI also tends to start and end with the user, while UX encompasses everyone who comes into contact with the product in any meaningful way, from salesmen to service people, from the person who buys it to the person who uses it. And as you become better at UX, it starts expanding out beyond just the product at hand into the whole experience.