UI and UX

Overview

I’m starting this note on Thu 01/02/2025. I’m not an expert on this stuff, but it’s something I’ve always struggled with despite intersecting with UI and UX for my entire career.

In short, the way to get better at this is just like anything else: try things out, gain some experience, and learn from others.

Approaching UI/UX from a developer’s point of view

Come up with my information architecture
- It’s how everything in your product relates to one another. E.g. one particular action may be high-priority, always visible, and always accessible. But then another action may be deep within a settings menu and wouldn’t be on the screen at all times.rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
- In other words, plan out your structure: what are all available actions/pages that you might have, which should be on top, what should be beneath those, etc.
What have similar products done before you?
- E.g. if you’re designing an e-commerce site, then the concept of a cart is pretty universal. You probably don’t want to break that expectation from your users. Similarly, a cart comes with a lot of ancillary expectations: the cart is probably at the upper right, you can probably modify the quantity of items in your cart, etc.
- ⭐️ Skipping this step is like skipping studying for an algorithms interview—you would be attempting to reinvent the wheel when asked a question. However, it took the collective of computer scientists years of work to come up with these algorithms, so you should bypass the invention process and skip to the much simpler/quicker process of simply understanding what others have done and why.
- You’re not looking to copy what others have done unless it’s truly a standard (e.g. pressing escape in a video game to open the settings menu); it’s for inspiration and design patterns.