Why use UI kits instead of creating custom CSS?

I have been big fan of UI kits. I also prefer user experience people actively user UI kits to design their interfaces. There are several benefits, especially in early days, where you want to not only focus on decent looking interfaces but also keep in mind about user experience.

This duality, certainly helps us deliver software in rapid iterations. It also helps developers to quickly follow the UI design and appropriately implement the components.

Benefits

Apart from that, we can get some other benefits such as Efficiency, Consistency, Upgrades.

The ready to use components allow designers to focus on crafting user experience rather than creating elements from scratch, and these elements are consistent and provide much better stability.

Since we use standard kits, upgrades are super easy and thus is maintenance, and given that UI Kit’s component design saves a lot of boiler-plate code thus resulting into a lot of time saving. For example, this website, is built on one such UI kit.

Responsive Designs and Accessibility features are another big areas, where these UI kits provide immense time saving.

So if you are looking for rapid prototyping and testing then it’s way more quicker for designers.

UI kits also put a lot of constraints on designers on what they can do what they can not, but that also focuses on making sure that we are not going after small incremental UI components who do not provide a significant value add in a short term.

Lastly they provide a consistent onboarding experience for new team members.

While UI kits restrict the creativity and uniqueness, but also unleashes a very different set of benefits outlined above to help us scale, iterate and rapidly deliver designs. Once we have enough traction then certainly time to move on and time to show our full creative potential is right there.