by Josh Redmond
5. UI/UX for beginners
User interface and user experience design are incredibly important and very complicated topics, understanding how your users are likely to interact with your application and empathising with their concerns, objectives, and desires allows you to put yourself in their shoes and make more effective applications. In the previous lesson, you learned how to compose a number of widgets together into an interface by using containers, and by doing this you have access to a powerful set of features for creating diverse and interesting interfaces. However, the first thing you should do is design what this interface looks like in an intentional way, rather than simply putting a few widgets together in a way that looks OK.
There are a number of tools and methods you can use for designing interfaces, and this will not be an exhaustive or detailed list, but will provide a few ideas on where to get started.
As a first step, it is important to consider your audience, and their objectives, in particular - what makes them distinct from other groups of people? What are their specific requirements and blockers that mean they would want to use a visual app like the one you are making?
When you are presenting information it is important to consider the following:
- What information needs to be shown? Do they need to see every chart and graph possible?
- What options do they need? Do they need to tune every aspect of the results or just one or two parameters?
- Why would someone want to use your application? What data are they interested in visualising and analysing, and how does that relate to their goals?
One important step, if you are able, is to sit down with someone from the target audience and work through either the analysis you are doing, the application you are developing, or even just the general topic you are working on. Through speaking to them, and listening to what questions they ask, and what they ask for, you will be much better able to develop useful tools.
Beyond that, it is really helpful to get feedback and opinions from others on your app as soon as possible. This will allow you to understand how your design is communicating information, and what decisions you have made which either help or hinder your goals.
When actually planning your application, it might be useful to draw out a design on pen and paper, or use tools like Figma to build prototype interfaces which then inform how you build up your application. Whilst at first it might seem like it is difficult to translate your ideas into an application, you will over time learn the skills necessary to do so.
To learn more about UI and Ux design, there is no shortage of inspiration and resources available to you online, I will link a few below, but the best thing to do is to look at applications you enjoy using and analyse them for their strengths and weaknesses, which you can then use to inform your own design and practices.
Because we are working on geospatial apps, I suggest beginning with Google Maps. Have a look at it in your browser and on your phone, and think about how information is displayed, what happens when you tap or click on a point of interest, and so on. Explore how many clicks it takes to get to relevant information, and how complex the path it, or think about who the target audience is and how that has affected the design of the app.
In the next lesson, we will start to work on some actual maps!