What are component libraries?
In the world of UX design and development, finding efficiency and consistency in workspaces is crucial for business success.
Imagine for a moment that you are a bricklayer building a house from scratch. You have a clear vision of how you want each room to look and function: the kitchen, the living room, the bedrooms. However, instead of manufacturing each element from scratch, you consider creating prefabricated pieces from molds adapted for each item: bricks, beams, doorknobs, doors, and so on. In this way, your house will follow a logical design, consistent with the type of rooms and spaces it contains. Similarly, in web experience design, we have component libraries.
This is where the concept of the component library comes into play in the realm of user experience. Just as an architect or builder might turn to a physical component library to select everything from doors and windows to faucets and handles, a UX designer or developer turns to a digital component library to find pre-designed and tested elements that can be integrated into their software projects.
How does this translate to the digital world? For example, when creating a mobile app for a food delivery service, instead of designing and coding every button, dropdown menu, or text box from scratch, you can access a component library that already contains a wide variety of common design elements.
From “Add to Cart” buttons to search bars and product cards, these prefabricated pieces not only speed up the development process but also ensure visual and functional consistency throughout the app.
Why create a component library?
There are several reasons why a UX designer creates and uses component libraries, reflected in the advantages aligned with its core principles:
- Consistency: By offering design elements under a standard, it ensures a coherent appearance and behavior across an entire system, avoiding potential user confusion when interacting with different parts of an app or website. This generates significant value for the application, strengthening the product’s credibility and usability.
- Iteration: The principle of iteration is again reflected in the use of libraries: by providing a collection of predefined and tested elements, different design and development teams can iterate on existing designs more quickly and efficiently, avoiding the need to start from scratch. This capability can be greatly beneficial when refining the overall experience in the long term, adapting interfaces to the changing needs of a client or app user.
- Scalability: As a digital product grows with additional functionalities, maintaining consistency in the new parts of its interface is crucial. The component library allows for the creation and expansion of an app’s size while keeping all interfaces cohesive, consistent, and similar, addressing business considerations like maintaining brand and style guidelines.
- Efficiency: Returning to business needs, work teams must be efficient and achieve the outlined objectives. Thanks to the use of libraries, design and implementation times are reduced, as are the resources required at each stage of work.
Atomic design
Brad Frost, an American writer with an interest in digital design, proposed a working model known as atomic design, a methodology that applies a chemistry analogy to the creation of a coherent design system: small components mix together to create larger, more complex components, enabling a hierarchy of components that range from atoms to complete pages, passing through molecules, organisms, and templates.
The atomic system provides a solid foundation for creating component libraries. By breaking down the user interface into basic, reusable components, it establishes a modular structure that facilitates the creation, organization, and maintenance of a coherent and scalable component library.
Each component in the atomic system represents a design “atom” that can be used and combined in various ways to build more complex interface elements. The atoms of a library — such as colors or the connection between two points — can create a molecule, like a colored word. Then, the combination of molecules creates organisms that can already exist independently, such as buttons, text boxes, or navigation bars. When combined into templates, they create forms like registration forms or dropdown menus, and when combined further, they form a homepage or an admin panel.
When applied correctly, this organization facilitates the creation of a coherent and easy-to-use component library available to the various teams involved in creating interfaces: design teams, development teams, business teams in the definition phases, and more.
Moreover, the modular structure of the atomic system allows component libraries to scale effectively as digital products grow and evolve. New components can be easily added to the library, and existing ones can be updated or replaced as needed without compromising the integrity of the library or the coherence of user interfaces.
The atomic system should be considered a robust framework, particularly useful for creating component libraries. The use of these methodologies is extremely valuable and should be considered by all teams involved in creating web interfaces and applications.
Ultimately, with a well-structured component library, UX design teams can confidently tackle more complex design challenges, knowing they have a solid foundation on which to continue building and evolving.
See Also:
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