Month: July 2021

10 Design Principles for Exceptional User Interface

Posted on by galaxy-admin

Creative visuals, attractive logo design, or intricate animations! What goes into making an exceptional user interface? A good UI includes a mix of factors that make it clear, consistent, simple, and user-oriented.

Defining the requirements of a good user interface is especially critical if you are considering outsourcing your project. Your design and development partner should understand the key principles that transform a user interface into a powerful tool for attracting new customers and retaining existing ones.

Let us go over the core principles of an effective and appealing user interface.

The 10 Fundamentals of a Good User Interface

Here is what goes into an appealing and intuitive user interface for a web or mobile application.

1. Consistency is the key

Source: Behance

In good user interface design, consistency rules the roost! Everything is affected, from the colors, icons, and fonts to the placement of menus and buttons. If changes are required and the designers who worked on the first version are no longer available, the situation becomes even more critical.

Top digital solutions do not astonish their users with radical changes. Instead, they use brand books and company style guides to maintain a consistent and unified style throughout UI design.

2. Hierarchy in screens

Source: Dribbble

Some inexperienced designers make the mistake of attempting to highlight everything on a single screen. Instead of guiding customers to a purchase or other desirable action, they bombard them with information.

That is why hierarchy is an essential component of a successful user interface.

It should be designed in such a way that users can quickly find the point of focus and understand what you’re trying to convey visually.

3. Flexibility 

Users now enjoy looking for a solution to their problems. That is why a good user interface should be supplemented with tabs, shortcuts, and hover tooltips. Such elements improve the interface’s usability and intuitiveness.

You may also like: 10 Tips to Improve Your Website Accessibility

For example, if an app allows you to upload photos, it should also allow you to crop, resize, rotate, and edit the image right next to it. The designers’ goal is to assist users in determining where such options can be found and whether such features are available at first glance.

4. Clear and intuitive user navigation

Where can I find the main menu? If you’ve ever asked yourself the same question, you’ve most likely encountered a poorly designed user interface. While visible to users, it should be “invisible” in terms of user disruption. A high-quality user interface should be well-structured and contain only the necessary elements.

For instance, a car-rental website should not be cluttered with unnecessary buttons, menus, and visual elements, but rather provide the option to rent a car right on the main screen. As a result, users will spend less time navigating your application and complete the transaction.

5. Target audience is well-defined

A digital product with a clear understanding of its target users has a better chance of retaining and engaging users. The primary goal of any web or mobile app is to alleviate the pain points of users, which is impossible to do without understanding how they interact with an application.

A good user interface is built on preliminary and in-depth market research, engagement of best practices from similar products, and evaluation of the target audience. This enables acting on a user’s needs and desires based on such an analysis and transferring the solution to the app interface’s pain points.

6. Transparency of user actions

When you click a button, you expect to see some sort of response. In UI design practices, leaving users without any feedback is considered bad etiquette. When users click on a menu, it’s a good idea to confirm the action with some sort of indication of successful operation, such as animation, color change, pop-up window, progress bar, and so on.

7. Limited number of gestures

Swiping, tapping, pressing, gesturing, or voice command are all options. All of these actions are used in the user interface to guide customers to the desired outcomes. Although it may appear to be a brilliant idea to use them all within an application, top interfaces such as WhatsApp or Facebook stick to a limited number of gestures.

When using an application, users should have a clear understanding of the actions that must be taken in order to achieve the desired result. If you tap to open a file, you should use the same gesture in all similar situations.

8. Additional tips and tricks

User retention is the primary task and, conversely, the primary challenge of any digital product. Fortunately, an effective user interface can help achieve the goal.

You may also like: 3 UX Gamification Techniques to Boost Engagement

Creating onboarding tips and showing them to customers is a good practice for very complex solutions. The UI carefully guides them through the app and helps them remember what each element is responsible for by placing small tips here and there, such as hover tooltips.

9. Attractiveness

This point is critical, despite being somewhat controversial in the eyes of some. A good user interface is one that is appealing and reflects the brand’s personality. Buttons, colors, fonts, and visual elements all contribute to a distinct brand story.

What appears appealing to one group of users may be repulsive to another. As a result, a successful user interface should be founded on extensive research. Furthermore, the visual aspect of user design should be used to reinforce functionality. Popular and well-known applications do not use colorful visuals that add no real value to the user interface.

10. Compliance with design standards

As previously stated, users must understand what to expect from a user interface.

Following Google’s and Apple’s primary and well-known design standards for Android and iOS is a good idea.

Take, for example, a search bar.

It is not a good idea to move it from the top of a page to the bottom. This way, the user interface will inadvertently make users struggle to perform actions that should be intuitive.

Conclusion

As you can see, good user interface design entails more than simply making an app or website look nice. It considers all of the users’ needs and creates an interface that reinforces consistency and assists users in completing their tasks in the most seamless manner possible. Use these tips as a guide for your next project, and you’ll be sure to deliver not only a functional product, but one that users will want to return to. 

Do you want us to get you or your company started on creating quality design components for your product? Reach out to us to get your project off the ground.

About Galaxy Weblinks

We specialize in delivering end-to-end software design & development services. Our UI/UX designers are creative problem-solvers with a decade of experience in all facets of digital and interactive design. We create compelling and human-focused experiences delivered through clean, and minimalist UI.

Node.js vs Python | Which Backend Framework to Choose?

Posted on by galaxy-admin

Choosing the right backend technology for your project is a decision that can have a long-term impact on your software. A favorable decision will be robust and easier to scale while a wrong one could send you down the path of rewriting the entire app, costing you time, money, and team morale in the process. 

Backend technologies are directly attributed to the stability, performance, and scalability of systems, hence thorough research is needed before making the decision. This blog will help you with that research. 

We’ll be comparing Node.js and Python on the following grounds:

  • Frameworks, libraries, and community
  • Use cases
  • Learning curve
  • Scalability
  • Performance

Backstory

Initially used in data sciences, Python has been ranking in web development as the most popular backend language since 2018-19.

Python is a programming language while Node.js, a runtime environment, on the other end boasts of a speedy V8 which makes it a popular choice for real-time server applications. 

So when you’re choosing either for your application take their respective ecosystems and how they fare for you into consideration.

Frameworks, Libraries, and Community

Python has Django and Flask as the most popular frameworks in its arsenal. Python also has support for rich libraries for various projects like:

  • Panda for data analysis
  • OpenCV for image processing 
  • matplotlib or Numpy for data visualization
  • TensorFlow/Scikit-Learn/PyTorch for machine learning
  • Raspberry Pi for robotic applications

When it comes to Node.js, NPM(Node Package Manager) is one of the richest libraries out there with about 1 million packages available. The most popular and dependable packages are:

  • express.js – a MEAN stack microframework
  • Nest.js – This framework is Node’s answer to Django
  • lodash for modular utilities
  • react for UI.

Takeaway

  • Both frameworks boast a rich ecosystem and libraries, which makes them a difficult choice. It comes down to your project and its inherent needs. If you think Python has the libraries that would make your life easier, then that’s the one you should go for. Same with Node.js!

Node.js vs Python use cases

Comparing Node.js and Python superficially is futile because both are robust and actively supported. To solve this mystery we have to dive into details. 

Python can be seen as a general-purpose language and hence is suitable for a vast range of applications. You can build web apps, machine learning projects, numerical computations, and even deep learning. The Banking and Insurance sector has a default inclination towards Python for the backend as it’s strong and natural at handling big data sets. 

When we talk about real-time and web-based projects that are data-intensive like chatting or streaming platforms, Node.js is the best option. Developers choose Node.js because of its asynchronous nature. It is ideal for projects that don’t require heavy processing and are good with I/O operations. Node.js is also preferred for memory-intensive applications like rendering 3D projects. 

Takeaway

  • Choose Node.js for small and extremely fast run-time apps.
  • Choose Python for large systems with huge datasets that require stability and consistency

Learning curve

Node.js is not a challenge to those who are adept at JavaScript. You can even utilize the same language to build the frontend as well as the backend of your application. Node, however, is natively asynchronous. The new developers find it hard to wrap their heads around in comparison to synchronous Python.

Python, on the other hand, is known as the easiest backend language to learn, as far as earlier phases are concerned. It is a compact and very well-documented language. 

Takeaway:

  • If your team is familiar with asynchronous code then it might be easier to go with Node.js. You’d still need to hire backend experts for complex problems. 
  • Even though introductory Python is dubbed as the easiest backend language to learn, the difficulty increases with the complexity of the problems.

Scalability

Node.js has an event-based asynchronous architecture and non-blocking I/O, which ultimately contributes to efficient scaling. As a default feature it’s great for smaller applications but not so much for the bigger systems. New developers or even intermediate ones will find it difficult to scale. 

Python is synchronous, however, it has additional tools that allow data migrations and data streaming. What works in its favor is how well it scales in code complexity.

Takeaway:

  • It’s a difficult call when it comes to scalability because both tackle scalability in their unique way, be it through architecture or tools. 

Node.js vs Python performance

We want fast apps and we want them now!  

Although it’s an unfair comparison, Node.js with its V8 engine and asynchronous architecture is one of the fastest server-side solutions among its peers. 

Python is not that far behind in terms of speed. With the latest release and speed optimizations, it has achieved up to 50% speed improvement in some cases. 

Takeaway:

  • Choose Node.js if building a real-time solution
  • In other cases where high-load is a concern, Python is recommended. 

Conclusion

When choosing the right software technology for your project, choosing between Node.js and Python can only add to your confusion as both are exceptional backend technologies. They can both be used to build robust, scalable, and performant software. 

We hope that this blog has helped you choose the appropriate backend framework for your project. If you’re still left with some unanswered questions, get in touch with our backend experts here.

Mobile Navigation on Large Website – Tips, Tricks, and Best Practices

Posted on by galaxy-admin

Designing mobile apps for large, content-rich websites comes with its own set of challenges. The alterations in viewport size now completely change the way we navigate a website. There are thousands of pages that need to be sorted and organized to make them accessible at a tap. You would also need to be sure that the users don’t suffer information overload. It’s a complicated puzzle that needs to be put together.

Here are some things you should know about mobile navigation and some best practices.

  • Menus: Utilize visual hierarchy to differentiate primary and secondary navigation.
  • Submenus: Avoid creating sectional menus. Allow users to peek into submenus via the dropdown or open/close menu.
  • You Are Here Indicators: Leave breadcrumbs for users to indicate their whereabouts. 
  • Navigating Between Websites: If you have multiple sites tied into the main website, then try to keep things consistent with headers and other elements. Link those headers in subdomains and landing pages to your main site. 
  • Site Search: Use keywords that your audience uses to optimize for search. All the pages must have proper context and details to land up in your target users’ search results.

Menus

Almost all the websites you’d see use the Hamburger menu for navigation on mobile. We have nothing against it but a little clarity goes a long way concerning accessibility. Here you can find alternatives for the Hamburger menu. 

Takeaway

  • A hamburger menu is a great option for tight spaces, but something such as a simple ‘Menu’ label aids easier navigation for all.
  • Larger sites are easier to navigate when menus are organized categorically, like primary and secondary navigation or based on user groups.

Submenus

The menus that expand by allowing users to open/close to see different submenus are very convenient. This way users can quickly sift through sections to find what they are looking for without going inside individual pages. 

Takeaway

  • Use dropdown or expand/collapse menu for deeper secondary and tertiary level navigation.
  • If you opt for section navigation, place it on the screen, where it is noticeable and close to the content.

Breadcrumbs

Your website’s page titles might match the navigation labels, but only a handful of users use this information to determine what page they’re on. A user should know the current state, if they end up at the same spot, again and again, it would lead to frustration.

Takeaway

  • Ensure that the user knows where they are on your website’s navigation to prevent frustration caused by getting lost. Also, provide a way back as breadcrumbs do.

Navigating Between Websites

When dealing with a lot of information, large websites divide certain parts of information or services into microsites. To ascertain that it doesn’t overwhelm users or cause any confusion, keep the headers consistent and link them back to the main site’s homepage. 

Takeaway

  • Use global headers to keep things consistent within sister sites with a link back to the main site. 
  • Use an offsite indicator if you’re linking the navigation menu to an external site.

Site Search

Optimize site search for keywords and keyword groups that your target users often use.

If your organization’s lexicon is complex and consists of internal lingo then confirm that your keyword search is equipped with auto-suggest. Often the page-based site search returns no results if there is nothing to be found corresponding to that keyword on that page. In such scenarios, the global site search could be of help and lead the visitor to the right place.

Takeaway

  • Use familiar keywords common with your target users to optimize site search
  • For large websites utilize global site search but with clear clues of visitors’ whereabouts.
  • Ensure that pages when landed on via any search—site search or a Google search—provide appropriate context.

Wrap up

While building large and complex websites mobile navigation shouldn’t be considered as an afterthought. Considering the massive adoption of mobile for internet usage, it could be a bad move to have botched-up mobile navigation for a large website. It could reflect badly on your brand, your products, and your services, as people might think of your offerings as not on par with the competition.

Our design experts at Galaxy can help you identify and solve these problems with you. Usability shouldn’t be an afterthought and mobile experiences are the backbone of any online business today, connect with us to make experiences that complement your business.

About Galaxy Weblinks

We specialize in delivering end-to-end software design & development services and have hands-on experience with mobile app and site design in agile development environments. Our designers, engineers, and developers help improve security, reliability and features to make sure your business application and IT structure scale and remain secure.

Vue vs React: When and How to Make the Right Choice

Posted on by galaxy-admin

Vue.js and React.js are two popular frontend JavaScript frameworks, with React tipping the scales for the last three years. Both tools provide developers with a productive approach to developing various Web applications, but each has its own best use cases and addresses different business needs. In this article, we’ll look at some of those use cases, as well as the benefits that distinguish Vue.js and React.

The Cream of the Crop

There are numerous reasons for Vue and React’s prominence on the developer landscape. Before we delve deeper into their distinguishing features, let’s take a quick look at what the two have in common that makes them so popular.

Virtual DOM  – With a regular DOM, the entire page is rendered after making changes. With both these frameworks, only the changed object is updated, thereby saving time and resources that heavy DOM manipulations would consume.

Component-based UI development – The extensive component libraries provided by Vue and React facilitate code reuse, increase developer productivity, and accelerate the development process.

Concentrate on the view library — Separate concerns for routing, state management, and so on.

Official component library for building mobile apps — Long-awaited in Vue, but now available in both tools.

React and Vue are among the two of the most popular JavaScript frameworks. According to the State of Frontend 2020, the most popular JS languages are React and Vue. 4500 professional front-end developers took part in this survey.

While both the platforms have some common advantages, let us compare how they measure up in terms of performance, scalability, security, flexibility, and other important parameters.  

Vue vs React: Performance

JavaScript utilizes two types of object models, virtual DOM and real DOM. The organization of working with the DOM is a major factor in the performance of JavaScript tools for developing interfaces.

React makes use of the virtual DOM, which is a lightweight, browser-independent system. One of the main reasons for React’s popularity is that it works very well with the DOM.

Vue also makes use of the virtual DOM, but it outperforms React in terms of performance and stability.

The performance difference between Vue and React is minor, measuring only a few milliseconds. This demonstrates that Vue and React have very similar performance.

There are some cases in which one framework outperforms the other. When you change the state of a React component, all of the components in its subtree re-render. You can prevent child component re-renders in React by using immutable data structures, ComponentUpdate, or PureComponent. However, this can add complexity and result in DOM state inconsistencies.

With Vue, the dependencies are tracked to avoid any unnecessary re-rendering. 

Vue vs React: Flexibility

React’s core provides only basic functionality. With the practical application of this library, its capabilities must be expanded. This provides the developer with a great deal of freedom when it comes to selecting additional tools.

They usually solve the following problems with the assistance of additional libraries:

  • routing, 
  • application state management, 
  • server rendering, and 
  • mobile app development

Vue, as opposed to React, provides a more comprehensive set of standard tools to developers. This enables you to use third-party libraries to solve the same problems that the React ecosystem typically solves.

Vue vs React: Security

Vue apps are slightly easier to secure than React-based apps. While automatic protections against XSS vulnerabilities are not possible, Vue developers can sanitize HTML code before implementation or use external libraries to help protect against attacks. You can explicitly render a safe HTML and protect the application. 

To protect against XSS vulnerabilities, server-side rendering attacks, SQL injections, and other threats, React security relies on the developer following security best practices.

Vue vs React: Scalability

React is at an advantage due to its ease of scalability. React apps are written entirely in JavaScript, and the developers can use traditional code organization methods for easy scaling. Reusability of components improves React’s scalability.

While Vue is also scalable, it is more commonly used in smaller applications due to its diverse set of flexible tools (although the size of the app of course depends on the architecture). Because of the dynamic architecture, you will need to use Vue’s libraries and Mixin elements to overcome scaling limitations. We believe that React is a better choice for building enterprise applications.

Vue vs React: Popularity

We can track developer interest in these two frameworks over the last two years using Google Trends statistics. It is quite obvious that React and Vue are in a race to best each other. 

Let’s look at the stack overflow 2020 stats. The survey is about popular web frameworks and shows the percentage of developers who are developing with the language or technology and are interested in continuing to develop with it. In this ranking, React is ranked second. And Vue is only a little behind. Vue has grown in popularity in a relatively short period since its initial release in 2014.

Vue vs React: Community Support

The React library is maintained and developed by Facebook. Anyone who chooses React as the foundation for their application’s frontend can be confident that it will not become an abandoned project anytime soon. Many additional tools have been created and maintained by the React developer community.

Vue, on the other hand, has grown in popularity, with many programmers contributing to its development. 

Vue vs React: Mobile Development

You can use React Native to create native iOS and Android apps. 

Vue is not as fortunate in this regard. It has announced its official support for the Weex project, a cross-platform UI framework developed by the Alibaba Group. With Weex, you can use the same Vue syntax to create browser components as well as iOS and Android apps.

Weex is still in the early stages of development and is not yet as mature or well-tested as React Native. A NativeScript plugin for creating truly native apps with Vue.js is another variant of NativeScript-Vue.

How to Make the Right Choice

Vue.js

Vue, as a progressive framework, can be incrementally integrated into an existing project based on project requirements. As an example, it could be used as a lightweight library to add interactivity to a Web application. 76 percent of developers polled for the 2019 edition of the State of Vue.js Report cite ease of integration as Vue’s most valuable asset. Whereas, 90 percent of developers in the 2021 report of State of Vue.js, claimed there is a very high probability of them using Vue.js for their next project.

Vue is ideal for delivering MVPs and startup ideas quickly, thanks to its simple learning curve and tools like Vue CLI 3 and Vue UI. Vue is also a cost-effective solution for small to medium-sized apps as a result of these factors. 

Don’t let that fool you into thinking Vue isn’t suitable for large Web apps. It has a large ecosystem of tools and companion libraries, allowing the framework to address the complex requirements of enterprise-grade applications.

React

React was designed for large-scale Web projects, therefore using it for small and simple apps may be excessive. Although it takes a lot of boilerplate code to get a working project up and running, React’s architecture pays off in the long run.

JSX gives developers access to the full power of JavaScript — flow controls and advanced IDE features like autocompletion and listing are included in component view templates.

React, unlike Vue, lacks official packages for routing and state management. To create complex apps, you must rely on third-party solutions for almost everything. However, the options are numerous. Experienced developers tasked with delivering advanced projects will understand which of the numerous libraries will be the best fit to meet the business requirements of a specific Web application.

Conclusion

Vue.js and React are both excellent frameworks for creating interactive user interfaces. You must consider several factors when deciding which one is best for your next project, including your specific use case, business needs, environment, developer availability, budget, and timeframe.

We hope this guide has helped you decide between React.js and Vue.js for your next project. If you still have questions about the technologies, or if you need a team of experienced developers to help you create your project, please contact us using the form here!

About Galaxy Weblinks

We specialize in delivering end-to-end software design & development services and have hands-on experience with popular front-end and back-end frameworks. Our back-end and front-end engineers also help in improving security, reliability, and features to make sure your business application scales and remains secure.