Developer Tips : Focus on feature and content, not the appearance
So I started searching on what is the best UI library that I will use to develop the project. UI design, library or framework that have the best look and feel for users so the user won’t feel tired or bored while using the app.
After analysing many libraries, I realize that even the best design, which in my opinion is Material design, in the end users will feel bored and feel that there’s nothing special with the design. Because appearance is kind of only work as a first impression, after a while using the app, the user won’t care about looks anymore, it is the content or feature that they will care about.
Looks are the first impression whether a customer will decide to choose our product or find another product that is better than ours, so looks are also very important too. Satisfaction of just a few glance looks of the app, the experiences they get are a crucial factor for customers to choose our product.
And even for me as the developer, developing an app that looks unique with a fresh UI is much more fun and satisfying than working on a regular app that has a boring look. Usually we will feel motivated to work on an app that has better look for a long time and not feel bored.
So far I have been using and only familiar with Bootstrap. I’ve used react material-ui but still have very little experience on it, for example just basic things like on how to make material ui being responsive on mobile clients, maybe in the recent version react material it is automatically responsive, i don’t know but i hope.
Like i stated before that material design has the best looks and i only knew Bootstrap, which is not based on material design. To cope with this I will use Mdbootstrap which is still Bootstrap but with material design looks. So i don’t need to learn React material-ui but still have material design looks.
Mdbootstrap works great but still it doesn’t have some components that I need, so it’s very painful to create one custom component by ourselves. Styling and designing a ui by itself can take forever, it’s not the best practice for a developer to focus on styling, let’s just outsource or hire specialists that have better experiences in styling. We must rather spend 95% of our time focusing on developing more features to our app, and focus on app logic not the interfaces.
After comparing many UI libraries, I have concluded that in the end looks are important but it shouldn't be our priority, the priority is our app content. All of these UI libraries slightly look the same, they just put different colors, borders and shadows. Again, the most important thing to our app is the features or the contents, information, menus, buttons, etc. And how is your app gonna solve as many problems as it can be.