These are questions an interior designer would be better equipped to answer. Similarly, when the software development project reaches a point where the specific details of how a user is going to interact with its various functions need to be defined, it’s time for the UI-er to take the helm.
The roles of UX architect and UI designer have clear distinctions:
UX architect
- Conducts usability studies, user research, stakeholder interviews, surveys
- Performs heuristic analyses
- Builds personas, empathy maps, storyboards, journey maps
- Creates logical architectures, navigation schemas and taxonomies
- Performs content mapping and organization
- Serves as the voice of the customer
UI designer
- Designs user interfaces
- Develops brand strategies, style guides, color theory and palettes
- Defines typography
- Designs iconography
- Conforms to accessibility requirements
More often than not, the process isn’t quite this linear. As more of the house gets defined, you might go back and readjust the size of the kitchen, or move the door a few feet. The same kinds of modifications might be made to a site map or to the navigation structure of a software project.
At the same time, in the same way you wouldn’t start building a house by talking about what the faucets will look like, it’s important to figure out the bigger pieces of the software product before focusing in on the details.
If you’re building a house, it will probably be a better constructed structure if the whole team is involved at every step; if the construction crew understands why the decision to place a door in a particular manner was made, they'll be more likely to build it right. In the same way, involving the entire software development team from the beginning will improve communication and result in a better product.
But while the entire team knows what’s going on, there’s typically someone with a particular skill set driving the process. The distinction between the skill sets of the developers and the designers is quite clear. What sometimes gets missed is that there's an equally important distinction between the UX and UI flavors of designers.