UI development consists of coding and building the User Interface designed by the UI/UX team.
The complexity of the development of a user interface depends on the UI/UX design and tools and good practices used by the development team.
This is a list of 5 tips to simplify UI Development.
5 tips to simplify UI Development
1. Using grids for UI design:
This has to be agreed upon beforehand between designers and developers. This simplifies a lot the development of the UI.
Using grids is not possible for all projects due there are times when more freedom on the location of the elements is required. However, every time using grids is possible, this will help the front-end developers a lot and will make the development process less prone to errors.
2. Using UI design tools:
Tools like Sketch, Figma, Adobe XD integrate different chunks on the UI creation and building chain. They make the collaboration between designers and developers flow easily. Additionally, these tools allow exporting style sheets, so the developers can use them in their work. Although these style sheets are not 100% ready to use, they serve as an awesome starting point for front-end developers.
3. Defining components libraries for UI development:
Having a component library for a project speeds up the work of the UI designers and developers. This is like having a palette with the different components that are allowed for being used in the project. This helps a lot with the UI development task because the elements are well defined in the library so there’s no need to develop every single element. Additionally, a component library gives consistency to the project.
4. Using global Sass variables for theme settings like colors, fonts, and others:
This tip is important because during the UI development process it will facilitate the implementation of quick changes in the UI.
5. Avoid calling color variables with color names:
Although this sounds obvious, it is a very useful tip. It can be seen in multiple projects that the Yellow variable which used to have the “yellow” value stored in it, suddenly has a “red” value stored in it.
This inconsistency is prone to errors hence is better to avoid it. A better practice would be calling color variables like primary color, warning color, success color, etc.