Designing Interfaces, 3rd Edition

Chapter 11. User Interface Systems and Atomic Design

The previous chapter gives many examples that point to a strong pattern in interface design: screen interfaces often are made up of a system of commonly used components. Recent developments in how designers and developers approach interface design build on this trend of design as a system. In this chapter, we’ll look at component-based front end UI frameworks. Understanding and using this approach will help you deliver consistency, scalability, and better usability to your software. Thus, this chapter covers the following:

• An overview of component-based user interface (UI) systems

• A summary of the Atomic Design philosophy that takes a components-based approach

• A look at selected UI frameworks (component libraries) specifically for web and mobile web that you will likely be working with

Designing software applications today means creating a rich interactive experience for consumers and business customers, no matter what device they are using or where they are. The expectation is that the experience is always on, always communicating with the world around it, communicating with other people, and dynamically responding to its user from second to second.

Today, software is created from the ground up to connect to the internet in order to take advantage of powerful cloud-based information processing, storage, and communication. Mobile devices are the dominant consumer computing platform. Customers expect a given application ...