WHAT IS USER EXPERIENCE / USER INTERFACE DESIGN?
In the contemporary web design industry, there is much more that goes into web design than the simple aesthetic choices of picking colors, fonts, and arranging page layout. Although I am proficient in those skills, much of the work I've focused on in recent years has fallen in the categories of "User Experience Design" and "User Interface Design," terms which may be confusing to many non-tech-industry folks.

"User Experience Design" is the process of creating efficient and fulfilling experiential flows for interactive websites; thinking about the logic of how pages are structured to present the interactive options in the way that will be intuitive to those who use the site. How can the website best communicate its mission & core information through its structure? What types of behaviors will the user want to engage in, and what tools will she need to achieve those types of interaction? If you think about the types of behavior you engage in on sites like Facebook, Gmail, eBay, etc, you can begin to get a sense of the complex chains of interactions that must feel intuitive and predictable to result in a good "user experience." User Experience design is most often noticed when it is bad (ex, "Why can't I figure out how to do X?" or "This website is confusing!").

"User Interface Design" is related to that process, but describes one particular aspect, the design of Interface components (like menus where you are presented with choices, or other places on websites where you "do" things) to make those as streamlined and intuitive as possible. As a "systems" thinker who enjoys left-brained thinking in addition to the more right-brained creative work, I find these aspects of the design process very fulfilling.