Design

  1. User experience – user experience a.k.a. UX is the field of making sure a website or app is intuitive and smooth for a user to use. If software is too difficult to use, someone will abandon it and search for a different alternative instead. UX engineers combine tech with art and design. It is less technical than other roles, such as backend developer, but more technical than something like graphic design.
  2. Fluent design – Microsoft’s design philosophy for Windows 10.
  3. Material design – Google’s design concepts for Android. I’d say it makes it look like things are made out of multiple layers of construction paper.
  4. Skeuomorphism – an outdated web design look where icons were meant to look 3D/popping out. It was considered cool at one point in time but has since gone out of style, and you will usually only see it on sites or programs that haven’t modernized their frontend. I think something flat and minimal looks better than something glitzy.
  5. Human interface design – Apple’s design aesthetic for iOS and macOS. The idea is that people will understand how to use an app if they’ve seen similar icons, buttons, and menus in other apps. So to make software easy to use, they want it all to look more or less the same. Then there isn’t a separate learning curve for every single app.
  6. Responsive design – a web design idea about making websites respond based on how big the window is. A responsive design site should look good on a computer monitor, tablet, or phone screen – in both portrait and landscape. And on a computer, a responsive design site shouldn’t break or look bad even if the user resizes the screen and makes it small instead of being maximized/full screen. Bootstrap is a popular framework for responsive design. I’ve used it for some of my websites, and I really like it, because it gives you so many responsive things without you having to do it all yourself.
  7. Some elements of responsive design include hamburger menus (the three lines that give you more menu options), top navigation bars, a lead image/logo on the navbar, CSS3 media queries to make your layout change based on width, glyph icons, columns, and breakpoints. A breakpoint in responsive design is not the same as a breakpoint in a debugger, even though they use the same word.
  8. Responsive design might not sound like a very new concept, but it wasn’t too long ago that web developers maintained two separate versions of websites: one for mobile and one for desktop. This was tedious because it required writing two separate codebases and also required the backend to check the user agent of the browser requesting a page, then figuring out if it’s mobile or desktop, which could potentially be error-prone. But a responsive design allows for desktop and mobile with a single site, rather than serving different users different pages based on their type of device.

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