Principles and fundamentals of User Interface

 Guiding Principles and fundamentals of User Interface for Business Intelligence 

User interface (UI) design is that process designers use to build interfaces within the software or computerized devices that specialize in style. Designers aim to make interfaces that users find easy to use. UI design belongs to graphical user interfaces. User Interface design is that part where you'll interact with the frameworks. ui training

UX and UI: What is the Difference? 

User Interface	User Experience
The user interface is the way that a user accesses and interacts with your system. It is the physical characteristics, whether digital or tangible. It is the part you interact with, the system's face to the user, and how they think of it.  Meeting your users' needs with simplicity and elegance are crucial to an excellent user interface.	UX stands for user experience, which refers to the overall interaction that a user has with your company, product, application, or service. It is every little detail rolled up into one term, including every touchpoint. Understandably, application teams dedicate a lot of time and attention to creating a user experience that makes their product a joy to own and a joy to use.
UI/UX does not always mean It is amazing.

User interface design guidelines:

1. Keep the interface simple

2. Create and use common UI elements

3. Be purposeful in page layout

4. Strategically use color and texture

5. Use typography to create hierarchy and clarity

6. Think about the defaults

User interface design principles: 

1. Visual design, usability, and psychology all play a part in designing user interfaces and user experiences. Let us explore these critical aspects related to business intelligence including 

• data visualizations and 

• reporting interfaces. 

2. Interfaces are often visual. But not always. Some are audible, such as when you send a voice command: "Siri, what is the weather going to be like?" 

3. Alternatively, tactile: Like how a care interface is a steering wheel and pedals. 

4. However, most interfaces that we are talking about today on the 

• web, 

• your phone, 

• tablet, 

• laptop. 

5. Further, users need to pay attention to a few elements within this, like:

6. Contrast 

1. Here, you are trying to draw in your users' eyes. Their eyes are following a page, and you can influence that. 

2. Contrast is an essential tool to distinguish and highlight important content visually. 

3. With an analytics dashboard, you are creating data-driven content to communicate a point. Charts can be un-opinionated by just nonchalantly displaying a series of data. 

4. However, you have the option to make charts opinionated which can help your users understand essential information quickly. 

7. Repetition 

1. You could also call this one "consistency." That means you should make similar stuff look similar and do that consistently. 

2. It applies to your analytics interface and even to every visualization. If you have a set of bars that are all one color, then try highlighting one. 

3. If you repeat that consistently on any other charts you are showing, it is a great way to show that this highlight indicates a corresponding factor or some relationship. 

4. Making buttons, links, fonts, and, often, most importantly, layout consistent with users' expectations, you will immediately eliminate a lot of the learning curve. 

8. Alignment 

1. Once your users are inside a BI tool such as a dashboard or a report builder, you can use alignment to help them find what they need. 

2. One of the most straightforward ways to organize a design is to align it to a grid. 

3. Best practices should incorporate horizontal and vertical alignment between every element that you are incorporating. 

4. This uniform sizing minimizes diversions by clearly locating dashboard features for your users. And it helps you make the design process less iterative by updating it. 

5. While more of a best practice, this nascent trend is becoming more prevalent as designers prove that it is a step that should not go overlooked. 

9. Proximity 

1. Just like with contrast and repetition, you guide your users' eyes by grouping them with like and moving them around the page to help them insinuate a story.

2. Your goal is to put the tools at your users' fingertips and organize everything in a way that makes sense. 

3. Many designers and non-designers alike tend to waste time judging every extra pixel of wasted real estate, but this is far from productive. 

4. Fortunately, the trend now is to allow padding, margins, and plenty of space for your elements to breathe. 

5. The white space helps align everything and organize elements into easily digestible groups. 

The Art of Dashboard Design: 6 Fundamentals to Master the User Interface: 

1. Differentiate Meaningfully 

• Make sure to use different colors in the user interface only when you want to communicate differences in meaning. 

• If you show two different colors on a chart, they should represent something distinct and probably something meaningful in the user interface. 

• Whether you have one color on a table or graph or a range of different colors, make sure the background is consistent in the user interface to help visually distinguish the chart. 

2. Using Gradients 

• In the user interface, gradients and variants make it difficult to tell if the color is changing. 

• If a bar in a bar chart is darker at the top and then the background fades to white at the bottom.

• Natural colors display most of your information and highlight it which gives greater attention to the user interface. 

3. Focus 

• Anything that's not data in a chart or graph should be just visible enough to perform its role.

• So, no visual effects. No lights, shadows, or 3D effects in the user interface. 

4. Analysis 

• We also have the primary theme color backing the table headers. 

• Proximity keeps actions pulled to the top right corner of each panel. The table has actions, and the pie chart has actions. 

• An example highlights the concept of proximity and shows how important it is to keep everything in the user interface that becomes more and more complex. 

5. Dashboards 

• Users generally want to take a handful of specific actions with their data. Common goals are to stay up to date on information within one application or interface and share that content with others.  

• We have a menu at the top left, a clear title, and a few similar-looking panels for consistency. The contrast shows in the darker gray dashboard on top of the light gray background, so the darker dashboard stands out as a container and allows the white panels to take center stage here. 

• Also, note the active versus inactive tab at the top left. The active tab feels like a part of the dashboard.

6. Reports 

• Reports have unique differences from dashboards.

• With these reports, your users can export, print, or share data in a PDF that exacts pixel-perfect reporting.

• Users can drag the columns around and adjust their sizes and split them, or add a row. 

User Interface design examples: 

• Craigslist is a great example because the UI buying and selling are not pretty and are not all that well organized – it is feature-packed. People have a positive user experience on Craigslist Despite the general lack of design. 

• If you want an item and find it on Craigslist, that is an overall good experience if you clicked on something beautiful to get there.

• Even though it is not the prettiest thing to look at, it can still be a positive experience of what UI comes down to its usability.

• The Nest Thermostat UI

• Nintendo's History of Mario Kart UI.

• World Wildlife Fund's iPad App’s UI.

Conclusion:

In this article we have learned about the difference between UX and UI designing, principles give a detailed explanation of rules, we heard about 6 different fundamentals to master UI and examples of user interface with a practical view of images. To learn more about designing and frameworks follow UI Online Training.