Redefining User Interface Design: Material UI's consistency and Heuristic Designs
Tags: frontend, ui, react
Published: 2024-03-22 22:10:59

User Interface design is a field that continues to evolve with the advancement of technology. Regardless of the tech stack or platform in which applications are being developed, an intuitive user interface is key to ensure that users can easily interact with the application. There are numerous libraries that developers use to design their interfaces. They include SaSS, Bootstrap and material ui. Additionally languages like CSS are a good solution when one wants to create their styling from scratch and design their app as they need. Both the design libraries and CSS provide a good way for frontend developers to integrate the design heuristics into their application/website. 

### 1. Consistency
Consistency is an important design heuristic that ensures the different interfaces on the application have similar appearance. For instance it would be inconveniencing for users to view a button that has a black background, medium sized then in the next page the button is large size and with a green background. It is important to maintain a consistent outlook across the components. Material ui provides components with similar properties that you can import across various sections of your application. 

### 2.  Ease of Navigation
Most users do not want to waste a lot of time figuring out how to navigate from one page to another or where certain functionalities are located. A well-designed application should provide an ease for users to navigate across all sections and access functionality without cognitive load. Research has shown that sometimes users might abandon an application or fail to complete tasks if its too complicated to navigate. Material ui provides navigation components such as appbar, drawer and tabs that make it easy to implement a consistent navigation structure. 

### 3. Minimal Element of Surprise
Users expect that components will have a similar structure across the components. For example, labelling of fields and positioning of the submit button in a form should have the same structure  in the entire application. Therefore, the user will not suddenly have to start memorising or relearning what the components mean when they come across a new structure. Material ui provides components to design forms in a similar manner across the entire application or website. 

### 4. Feedback and Confirmation 
After completing certain actions within the application users need feedback or confirmation if their task was successful. For example when doing a search and the user enters a typo the application should provide feedback for the user to enter the correct value. After submitting a form the user may need confirmation that the data was successfully submitted. Material ui provides components such as toast to help give the user feedback about successful actions, errors or confirmation after specific actions. 

### 5. Ease of recognition
When interacting with applications or websites most users need something that they can easily recognise instead of trying to recall what it means. Therefore, to enhance the design it is valuable to use visual effects and integrate the use of icons that have elaborate meaning. Material ui provides many icons that can be integrated in the interface to make it more recognisable. 

### Conclusion 
Creating intuitive user interfaces is an important aspect of application or website development. As a beginner it would be valuable to style using CSS before moving to the other libraries that provide already designed components. 

#### How to use Material UI

- Access the official material ui website.
- https://mui.com/material-ui/getting-started/
- Explore the different components that are available and integrate them on your application using the provided instructions.
- You can customize the components to match your specific design requirements such as color, size or even the positioning.