Why Products Degrade Over Time (How to FUTURE-PROOF Your Designs)

Users of your product need your interface to be clean, modern, intuitive and easy-to-use. These days, UI and UX is critical for getting customers to adopt your product and stick with it.

But how do you make sure that your team is shipping pixel-perfect user interfaces all of the time?

I have a simple strategy and I’ll show you how I do it in my projects.

It allows us to:

• Build and ship new features really fast — without extensive rounds of design mockups and front-end development cycles.

• It also enables my back-end developers, who aren’t designers, to be able to ship finished, polished, user-interfaces.

• And ultimately, with this strategy, we’re able to keep our UI consistent for users across the entire app.

Too often when you’re app is brand new, or you’ve just rolled out a fresh redesign, the interface is nice and sleek in those early days. But over time, as more features are added to the product, the interface degrades, it becomes inconsistent and things start falling apart.

This strategy future-proofs your product and ensures your nice, well-designend UI can remain consistent through many iterations and new feature development.

What’s the strategy I’m talking about?

Components. Let me explain.

Components create predictability (for users).

Consistent UI and UX is about predictability for your users. You want the interface to be clean and intuitive for users to learn. But more importantly, you want it to feel familiar and you want users to quickly advance themselves to becoming power-users.

From a design standpoint, consistency across your menus, your buttons, your forms, your popups, and all the common components that make up your app’s interface is key.

Take Notion, for example. Notice how all the different dropdown menus across the app share a similar strucutre, look and feel — while still accommodating small differences based on the use-case.

But how do we actually implement consistent, polished interfaces throughout development? How do we ensure that our fresh designs that we create today will remain intact when we add 50 new features later this year?

Building with components

The strategy here is to build with components.

The sooner you can start extracting your commonly used interface elememts to reuseable components, the better.

These are the most common UI components that I make in all my projects:

• Dropdown menus

• Buttons

• Forms

• Modals

• Popovers

But as a project evolves, I often create additional components.

I’ll show you 2 different projects of mine — one that’s brand new and another that’s a few years to show you how my use of components evolves over the lifetime of a product.