Backdrop Design Essentials

User-Centered Design (UCD) is at core for backdrop design principals, we value users, their experience hence the usability over all other aspects of design.

User-Centered Design (UCD) is the process that we follow and value at backdrop and suggests our designers, developers and implementors to design, develop or implement for or by using backdrop from the perspective of how it will be understood and used by a human user.

Design Vision

The design vision of backdrop is based on 3 main aspects

• Keep it simple - Do not overwhelme your end users, build an easy to use and pleasant to experience software

• Goal oriented and and consistent - Focus on the goal or objective you are trying to solve for your users and approach towards the solution should be consistant within the context of backdrop as a whole

• Powerful when needed and progressive disclosure - At times you might need to put powerful features for power users but do not just start with, disclose your power features progressively and when needed

Design Principals

Our design principals are suggested to use in support of our design visions

• Keep it simple

  • Simplicity and minimalism are two most important factors we value and suggest to keep in mind when developing for backdrop

  • Wear the two hats and one should be of user, whome you build for. Think from the users perspective

  • Do not just overwhelm your users keep it as simple as possible

• Goal oriented and and consistent

  • Build it easy to focus on what matters, avoid clumsy and unnessary elements for primary task

  • Make things which are intuitive and easy to learn and consistant with backdrop patterns

  • Design for novice users and make them feel like experts by providing the appropriate defaults and by following patterns well practised and easy to recognize

• Powerful when needed and progressive disclosure

  • Great power comes with great responisbilities, think for you novice users as well and do not disclose your power features at will, progressive disclosure is the key

  • Do not keep users clueless, try to engage users with information, progress of the primary task/goal and appropriate messages

  • Think about interactions considering optional functionality or configurations but those should not interfere with the primary task

  • Build software to help users, user should not feel at mercy of a software or a tool