Designing a great User Interface (UI) requires more skills than just knowledge about creating web elements. When brainstorming the UI, the designer has to put the user at the central. There are several factors that determine the success of an app and User Experience (UX) is one of them. By putting yourself in the user’s shoes, you’ll learn to approach the design process from a different angle. What looks good aesthetically may not be useful at all to a user. When all else equal, it’s good UX that sets you apart from the competitors.

Building good UX requires the designer to pick the right front end framework. Reliable frameworks will help the designer work faster, streamline the design process by eliminating the need to hand-write parts of the code. Efficient frameworks generally speed up the loading time of an app while making bugs and glitches easier to spot and fix.

Things to Keep in Mind While Picking a UI/UX Framework

Making a choice is not always easy when there are multiple options out there. Here are some tips to keep in mind when selecting the right framework:

Your skill level: While complicated frameworks with feature-rich modules may look tempting, take your current skill level into consideration when making a choice. Simplicity is always better. Start with a straightforward design and speed up the process. You can always fine-tune it later as the project evolves and you start getting feedback from real users.

Reliability: Frameworks with a good codebase offer reliable performance and security optimization that protects you from cyber attacks.

Appearance: Choose a framework that helps you get the design you want with as little hassle as possible.

Mobile-responsiveness: More than 50% of all users use their mobile to browse the web nowadays. If your design is not mobile-friendly, you are giving away potential customers.

5 UI/UX Frameworks for Consideration

Bootstrap

Bootstrap is used by a majority of companies, and for good reason. Apart from being newbie-friendly, this framework is completely mobile-responsive, supports the most common pre-processors and languages, and has plenty of documentation. Being the most-used open-source framework, Bootstrap receives regular updates and incredible support from the community.

Materialize

With its rich library of design components like buttons, navigational bars, icons, forms, cards, and ready-to-use CSS codes, Materialize is good for quick prototyping. Once a designer gets used to its enormous library of design components, putting all together is a quick and easy task. Unlike Bootstrap, Materialize doesn’t support Flexbox, which is a popular CSS layout.

Semantic UI

This framework arrives after Bootstrap but it has already attracted a strong following. One of its advantages is its small file size, which means your site’s loading speed won’t be affected much once Semantic UI is added. The modules come with their own stylesheets and JS files, making customization a breeze.

UIKit

The name says it all. UIKit is suitable for designers of all levels. The modular structure makes it easy to do customizations however you want without affecting other elements. UIKit comes with many advanced features such as nestables and JS off-canvas bars. Being a very new framework, UIKit lacks sufficient documentation and support but as more users switch to it, the situation will change soon.

Ant Design

For those who plan to use React JS on the front end, Ant Design is a wonderful design framework that will streamline your work process and make everything easier. Ant Design was created with React in mind, therefore integration is a breeze. Forget about writing custom CSS codes for styling your components. You can do it easily by creating the corresponding Ant Design components.