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Every App Development Team Needs a UI Library to Deliver Faster
I always enjoyed building app interfaces and was always involved in building UI libraries to help out with the process. Working in different companies allowed me to experience the impact of having a good, bad, custom, or third-party UI library in the time it takes to deliver a UI view.
UI libraries are an easy detail of app building to overlook which has an extremely high impact on team productivity. It is also an expensive and hard thing to get right so oftentimes companies try to balance UI building with app development which puts a lot of stress on developers and designers.
Building UI is hard
Designing and building UI is not easy. A UI developer needs to balance all the communication with the UX team with the details on the UI implementation. Everything needs to be tested and depending on UI requirements, it needs to be accessible, responsive, work smoothly, and provide a good user experience.
It requires a lot of knowledge around pixel-pushing, animation, the tools in use, and the environment you are building for; without mentioning the talent. This is all before having to handle data flow, architecture, structure, API integration, unit, and E2E tests of the app.
It is very important for both, developers and designers to agree on the UI library.
A UI developer is the “middle-man” ensuring that the backend and UX work come together smoothly. Figuring all the details out ahead of time or during implementation requires a lot of effort and time which may leave little time for work. It can easily become chaotic or introduce UI bugs to the app if done under pressure.
Major Tech companies have their own UI library
I work at companies I almost never wrote a single UI component. All components were ready to use, well documented and designers use them in their design so I only ever had to worry about composing them.
Having all the details about how components look and work already figured out for you means that as a developer you just worry about the overall experience and architecture details of the app.
