In Part 1 of this series, we explored the history of user interface design, from MS-DOS and Windows 1 through to iOS and Material Design.

In this second installment, we take a look at what UI design means in today’s market, and examine what separates good and bad interfaces. We also discuss why looks aren’t everything. Finally, we sneak a peek at some of the new patterns emerging in UI design—including Google’s “Fuchsia” and Microsoft's “Fluent Design”, and point you to a bunch of great resources to help you get started in UI Design.

Read Part 1 here: From MS-DOS to Material Design—A Brief History of User Interfaces

4. What does UI design mean today?

Today’s UI designers are usually already designing interfaces for apps within an operating system. Many of the parameters of a user interface are therefore outside of the designer’s control. For example, if a UI designer is working on an Android app, they have no say over the screen size and resolution of the user’s device; of how the user has set up their notifications; or of whether they’ve installed another app to reprofile the color on the device’s display.

UI designers who are working on apps are, instead, usually trying to work creatively within the constraints of a given device and its OS. What’s more, their job is often to comply or cohere with the guidelines of the OS developer (Google for Android, Apple for iOS). Apple publishes list of UI dos and don’ts for developers, as well as a detailed set of Human Interface Guidelines, and Google has a comprehensive visual and UI style guide called Material Design. Check out Google’s explainer video here:

It’s partly because of these constraints that the focus of today’s UI designers is often on the fine detail of how screen layouts are designed, and how smoothly a user can move through stages in their journey through an app or website. Feeling short of time is an almost universal experience in modern life, and users have very little patience with interfaces that feel slow, clunky, or hard to understand.

Here are a few typical features of visual user interfaces today.

We can understand many UI elements as invitations to the user to interact with the app or device in a particular way.

Text input & cursor invite the user to type in some text, and a Submit button invites the user to click or tap to proceed.

A toggle, here represented by a sliding switch, invites the user to enable or disable an option.

An icon invites the user to click or tap to open another app or function.

When selected, perhaps using a hamburger button...

...a menu appears and invites the user to choose from extra options.

A slider invites the user to tap/click and drag to change a setting like screen brightness.

A dropdown menu invites the user to click or tap, and then to select an option from a list.

These are just a few examples of UI elements, and there are lots more where they came from. But they give you an idea of the patterns that today's designers use when crafting user interfaces, as they seek to add to a product's value by designing a pleasant and efficient front-end user experience.