Why would you need a maintainable user interface?
There are plenty of reasons why a good user interface (UI) should be maintainable. Think about it, of all the components in your applications, the user interface is probably the one that will change the most. It can change because requirements change, user experience problems were found in the previous version or even when your organization chooses to rebrand.
Coping with change is hard enough but with UI’s you want your changes to be consistent with each other at all times. You can’t have one screen look completely different in your application than all the other screens because we all know that consistency is one of the main drivers of your UX.
Bottom line: While you are building your application, you better make sure your UI has a certain level of maintainability or it could come back and haunt you in the future.
Component based design
Classic software development has many techniques that help us build a maintainable UI. Reusability is often the key here. Within component based design UI’s are constructed using reusable components. The main giveaway here is that when one component changes, all the pages it was on should reflect that change. Probably the most known example of component based design at the moment is atomic design.
NoCode-X offers all functionalities needed to follow a component based approach in our nocode template editor.
Design system
A design system is a set of rules that define how a UI should look and how it should behave. Such a system can deliver great benefits to teams that create UI’s. It can help create a visual consistency within your applications and even across applications. It can help speed up the UI development process and alleviates strain on design resources.
NoCode-X offers a built in design system that can be reused across applications within the same organization. Making you build your nocode UI’s even faster!
Changing without breaking
Changing your UI without breaking your application(s) is harder than you think. You might break a certain logic or mess up a flow or even introduce usability problems. By working in a component based approach you only have to change one component to have your change reflected on all pages this component is used. This brings along a challenge in making sure every single page still works as expected.
In classic programming one way of dealing with this challenge is by creating so called automatic end-to-end tests which can be ran before each release. Alerting developers of errors before a new version finds its way to production.
NoCode-X has built in end-to-end testing functionalities on its roadmap for 2022. These will play together nicely with our built-in version control & release management. Be sure to follow our roadmap updates for more information.
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