Main image of article UI Developer Career Path: Skills You Need to Succeed

If you’re interested in design and code, consider becoming a UI developer. In simplest terms, UI is what the user sees on a screen: the icons, text, colors, backgrounds, and any moving elements (such as animations). As a profession, it involves graphic design, programming, and other skills. How can you develop a solid UI developer career?

Let’s break down the technical and “soft” skills necessary for a UI developer career, including wireframing and user flows. If you master these, you’ll be able to give users around the world an excellent experience when they visit your websites.

What is UI?

It’s important to note that many people use UI (user interface design) and UX (user experience design) interchangeably when talking about website design, but the two are actually different disciplines. As we mentioned above, UI is what the user sees on the screen; it overlaps quite a bit with graphic design, which is why graphic designers' education and independent-project backgrounds allow them to break into UI work.

Meanwhile, UX is the study of how the user moves through all those elements that the UI folks have designed. For example, a UX designer is interested in how many clicks it takes for an app’s user to access a particular feature. Optimizing these flows is a key goal of all UX work.

All that being said, UI and UX developers and designers often rely on overlapping skills, and many tech pros specialize in UI and UX simultaneously. According to Lightcast (formerly Emsi Burning Glass), which analyzes millions of job postings, here are the top skills listed for UI/UX positions:

How can I train to become a UI developer?

Many schools offer formal degree programs in graphic design and user-interface design that incorporate UI and UX coursework. If you’re a self-learner, dozens of online courses can instruct you in the intricacies of UI; check out this list on Coursera.

Many of the nation’s largest tech companies also offer courses in UX/UI design, including:

Don’t forget to master key programming languages

Given how a UI developer works primarily with a website’s front end, you’ll also need to master a basket of programming languages and technologies, including:

JavaScript: This is the language that powers web browsers. JavaScript can be a bit of a troublesome language because of its lack of static typing. As such, while you’ll want to know JavaScript, you’ll also need to learn TypeScript.

TypeScript: We can debate all day whether TypeScript is an actual programming language. What you absolutely need to know is that TypeScript is transpiled into JavaScript, which means that you can use it in JavaScript contexts. Many developers find TypeScript much easier and more fun to use.

In addition to coding TypeScript and JavaScript, you’ll need to master HTML and CSS, which describe the appearance of a website. In the software development world, there are a few languages that pretty much everybody is just expected to know; HTML and CSS are two such languages. Most people don’t take formal classes to learn HTML and CSS and instead rely on just practicing while reading blogs and articles online.

Master the front-end frameworks

There are three main front-end frameworks people use for building front ends. These are TypeScript and JavaScript libraries that make the hard work of building a functional front-end much easier:

  • React: Originally created by Facebook (and still maintained by Meta, Facebook’s parent company), this framework has spread in popularity and is one of the top front-end frameworks.
  • Angular: Originally created by Google, this framework is maintained by a community of developers. It has evolved significantly, as the current version bears little resemblance to the original “Angular.js” which came out in 2010.
  • Vue: This framework was originally created by one person, Evan You, and now has a huge team of contributors.

Which one should you learn first? There’s no definitive answer, but probably either Angular or React is a good choice. (Vue is the next rising star, but isn’t quite as big as React and Angular.) Pick one and learn it as best you can.

Pro tip: Pick either React or Angular and become an expert. But be warned: neither is particularly easy to learn; you need to really understand TypeScript and especially JavaScript concepts such as callbacks, promises, and dependency injection. Understanding those concepts will make your life much easier in React and Angular; from there, you can move on to Vue.

Learn UI mobile concepts

If you’re planning to develop for mobile (primarily iPhone/iPad and Android), you need a different set of skills:

  • Android: If you’re going to develop front ends in Android, you must become familiar with Java and Kotlin, the primary programming languages for Android development. You’ll absolutely need to master Material Design, Android’s design system. Fortunately, Google provides lots of documentation and tools related to Material Design, which will allow your UI work to pass muster in Android’s app store, Google Play.

Design skills are key for a UI developer career

As a UI developer, you also need to be an expert at design skills, including the following:

Wireframing and mockups: This is a way to demonstrate to other members of the organization, including those outside of development, what the front end will look like.

User stories and flows: These describe what the software does (from a user perspective) before the software is built. It helps the developers understand what the software will do. As a UI developer, you’ll help put together the user stories, and you’ll help implement some of them through your code, with your teammates on the backend assisting with the implementation. Note that, from a technical perspective, user stories are typically written as sentences, such as “After I sign in to the site, I want to go directly to my profile page.” User flows, however, provide similar information but more in a graphical nature.

Font choices: As the UI developer, you need to understand how important fonts are and how the choices can impact the user experience. Some fonts are easier than others to read; some fonts call themselves out on the page as the first thing the user sees, for example.

Color combinations: This typically involves starting with a company’s color brands (AT&T was an early pioneer of the importance of brand colors), and from there working with additional color combinations that work on a website. This includes using colors that don’t clash, while also using colors that people with color blindness can still read.

Usability: This is a huge topic in itself, but it essentially means making the software as user-friendly as possible, and as a UI developer, you’ll likely find yourself teaching other developers on the importance of usability. Many books have been written on this topic; there are two old classics that are required reading, the first being “The Design Of Everyday Things” by Don Normon. As the title suggests, this book focuses mostly on “everyday” things like doors and buttons and such, and less on computer design. The second is “The Inmates Are Running the Asylum” by Alan Cooper. (Cool side note; he’s the guy who invented Visual Basic.) These books are a bit dated, but they’ll get you started.

Communication and writing: In a sense, front-end software development is a form of communication; you are providing the communication between the app and your end user. As such, you need to learn how to keep everything brief and to the point, with minimal words and even partial sentences, unlike articles you might read about how to be a good UI developer. For example, don’t provide a long multi-paragraph summary of what your app does on its front page. Instead, just provide a few words such as “Welcome to XYZ Banking.” The user can figure out the rest.

Conclusion

Being a UI developer is a great career choice for people who love both development and front-end user experiences. It takes a bit more preparatory work than other fields because it’s a hybrid of design and development. However, the ability to help people successfully navigate a website or important piece of software is absolutely worth the time and effort needed to master UI development.