Ask HN: How do you design UI applications?

8 pointsprando6y ago2 comments

I recently built a basic GUI application to help with the chore of selecting photos for wedding album prints from a digital collection. The app merely saves the names of photos that the user selects (/likes). I used tKinter in PY. A few of my friends were also interested, but I found that my app wasn't robust enough. I am curious to know what language/GUI programming paradigm is easy to learn for beginners and yields good robust solutions. I just started to look at QT which seems to support cross-platform. Please advise :).

2 comments

ThePhysicist6y ago

The Apple human interface guidelines are a good source of information: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...

If you want something that isn't tied to Apple you can find a list of similar guidelines here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_interface_guidelines#Exa...

Personally I find that KDE, gnome and xfce have great UI, you can find their guidelines in the list above.

Regarding implementation I'm a big fan of Qt, there's an excellent python binding as well (PyQt), which makes it easy to get started especially if you already have your logic implementing in Python.

prandoOP6y ago

Thanks much for your kind reply. The first link has a lot of guiding philosophy despite it being attached to Apple, I will try incorporating this. I am a FW developer and when I developed this GUI and put it in few users' hands, I realized how counterintuitive something can be in terms of usability.

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