Seeing the future through UI
05 Oct 2023
Gen Z and the evolution of UI design
As frequent purveyors of the newest and greatest technologies, our generation has grown up watching trends in user interface design evolve and transform. With our collective experience with different UI systems, I like to think that we have developed an innate ability to sense what is functional and what may be less optimal that supersedes personal preference (most of the time). Because of this, I was excited to start learning about implementing UI features and acquiring the tools to experiment with my own UI designs.
Freedom of creativity
The creative aspect of the process is the most appealing to me. Though most of our in-class activities consisted of recreating designs, I feel great freedom in knowing that I have all of these features at my disposal to create any kind of design I would like. However, in this case freedom in expression also came with freedom in implementation. Having identified multiple ways to perform a task, I often found myself becoming confused and frustrated trying to implement both solutions based on my instinct and solutions found online.
Contrary to what seems to be popular belief, I never find myself terribly dissatisfied being limited to raw HTML/CSS; I felt that explicitly defining the style of each element was easier for me to keep track of despite being tedious and repetitive. While implementing Bootstrap 5 elements, sometimes the default style elements of certain classes would conflict or compound on my custom CSS, which was confusing to identify. However, I recognize the utility of both, and learning how to implement them makes me excited to build the interfaces that will become the accessibility and design trends of the future.
Design of tomorrow
I feel confident in my ability to implement both despite these challenges. I was surprised to find out that UI design was a hot topic among my peers – not everyone finds satisfaction in building website frameworks. I have always had an interest in this topic, so I am grateful to have had the opportunity to learn what it is like to work with both raw HTML/CSS and Bootstrap 5 and I look forward to learning more in future experiences.