As a regular person (not a professional digital designer), when you look at this section below, how many objects do you see? Let’s say we have four menu items, four side menu items, a title and six fields. This thing is really easy to lay out, isn’t it?
What’s a UI kit and how it saves you time and money
Here’s what a professional UI designer would see in the same image:
And last but not least — how would all these elements look on a mobile phone?
So when it comes to actually designing this simple section, instead of laying out a bunch of boxes and titles, a designer needs to meet with the client, come up with a list of elements, design active, inactive, hover, on click (on tap) state, and many other states and minor UI elements to make the interface look usable and vivid. Instead of 30 minutes, it takes four hours.
What if you are designing an interface with 45 screens? That sounds like a hell of a lot of work, doesn’t it?
This is where we use UI kits to save our time and our clients money. A good UI kit consists of all the necessary interface elements that a designer can quickly utilize and then effectively pass them to the coder. A great UI kit even has the front-end code so that the development team could pull out pre-set HTML/CSS elements and insert them into the back-end code. At the end of the day, you don’t want to re-invent the wheel, do you?
Does it mean that my product will be similar to other digital products?
Not necessarily. Pre-set UI kits can be updated per client branding and marketing requirements. Want to have a different font type or buttons with rounded corners? No big deal. You can find a UI that best fits your branding requirements or tweak another one. At the end of the day, you will still have a comprehensive set of interface elements without too much effort.
Would that be useful to any digital project?
Not at all 🙂 If you are designing a custom landing page, marketing collateral, e-mail templates, and the like, you might not need UI kits at all. But if you are designing a complex interface for a financial company, bank, or online web service or portal, it will surely save you tons of time.
In most cases we highly recommend UI kits to our clients, especially if it’s a small or mid-size business or a startup.
