UI for Dummies

20 Feb 2019

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Importance of UI

Designing user interfaces is a field onto itself. Universities even offer degrees in “User Experience Design,” but for the average software engineer, building user interfaces can be a hassle. Unfortunately, all app creation requires some kind of UI design, and professors, bosses, investors, and users will all appreciate an app better if it is clean and stylish. Fortunately, UI frameworks like Semantic UI exist to make software engineer’s life easier.

Decent and Quick

UI frameworks have prebuilt CSS styles that allow software to quickly mimic common modern UI designs. Instead of creating a stylesheet from scratch, programmers can quickly use the existing classes to create UI elements that make sense. Semantic UI allows programmers to use keywords to describe the UI element they want, which allows them to create a nice UI in under an hour. Without a UI framework, getting the CSS stylesheet right could take more than an hour, and since the prebuilt classes mimic modern UI designs, the UI will look like any other professional website on the internet.

Responsive

With the explosive growth of the mobile and tablet markets, mobile versions of websites are a basic requirement for professional webpages. UI frameworks excel in creating responsive websites. Common UI elements also have common ways of transitioning to smaller screen sizes. UI frameworks build these transition methods into the class keywords, so if you want your UI grid element to double the rows as the screen shrinks, add “doubling” to the div class, and it takes care of the rest. No matter the project, UI frameworks massively reduce the time it takes to create an acceptable face for a web app allowing the programmer to focus on functionality.