Ask HN: How do you design UI applications?

8 points by prando 6 years ago | 2 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 :).

ThePhysicist 6 years 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.

prando 6 years 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.