As You Develop Software, Always Consider the User Experience

By David Rubinstein

You may have written the most elegant code to create your latest application, receiving kudos from other developers on your team for the effort. But if it fails to satisfy users, it’s all for naught. That’s why keeping the user experience in mind from application concept to deployment is so important.Josh Ulm, group vice president of UX Design, PaaS and IaaS at Oracle, spoke to SDTimes online editor Jenna Sargent recently on how to organize a UX team to complement your development team.

Developers, he posited, are only one leg of the three-legged stool of application creation. The other two are product managers and designers. The key, he said, is to keep designers feeling like they’re a part of the development process.

One platform that helps designers and developers work together is the Indigo.Design platform from Infragistics.

The platform is composed of four key elements. Sketch UI Kits is a library of UI components, patterns, pre-defined screens, with each symbol in the UI kit mapping to an Angular compionent in Ignite UI for Angular. Indigo Cloud allows designers to add hotspot navigation and screen transitions to their applications, and more. A Code Generation Service, that is a Visual Studio Code extension, integrates with designs in the Indigo Cloud to create UI code in Angular, and Ignite UI for Angular, which comprises more than 50 UI components built on the Angular framework – including extremely fast data grid and data chart.

When the design prototype is complete, the design team can share the URL with the development team, which can access the design in the Infragistics Visual Studio Code plug-in and generate code for whichever part of the screen they want.

Angular wants developers to build better app experiences

AngularJS was created with developers in mind, and recent advances have focused on the tool chain more than the framework. In an interview with Stephen Fluin, Angular developer advocate at Google, he told SD Times his team is doubling down on the tools that help developers keep up with the rapidly evolving tool ecosystem. He cited ng update, a tool created to help developers stay on top of dependencies and update to the latest version of Angular or other third-part tools, and will make changes to the application driven by those third-party updates.

In the interview, he also noted that most all Angular teams are using component libraries, due to Angular’s architecture.

All of which means better experiences for application users.