sure. I've used them a time or two.

For me, it's along the lines of: I've got a project, and the turn around time is incredibly tight for the 'first pass' ....as in, the client wants to see a mockup or idea in the next few days... happens more often than I'd like, but that's the business. So, you start coming up with your general ideas, layouts etc... but, you just so happen to come across a UI kit on your travels... and it's very close to what you're trying to accomplish...or more likely, there's 'aspects' of it that do.

so.

you buy that thing, or download it or whatever, and use the pieces that you liked, in order to create the project.

it's not that mysterious really.

It all depends on the situation, or the place you work. Sometimes you need a head start on a project, sometimes you need a few pieces that you don't have time to make yourself...but they're crucial to your project, so you buy em.

It's honestly not necessary to rebuild the wheel for every single project that comes across your plate.

No, but I like to look at them.

As a developer, I've got a positive experience of using UI kit even without design skills at all. It really saves a lot, if there're a lot of components offered for every case. Specs, grid, indents. Nothing to worry about. For our small team without hiring a designer it was lifesaving! Purchased some kits from Greatsimple before, but after we've moved to Figma finally those guys are the best at building UI systems, IMHO

I never used to see the point but am definitely coming round.

When I've found them most useful is when working with frontend frameworks on products where we're designing quickly and don't need something heavily customised. Eg: A company admin system that's in no way customer facing.

The developer is using Semantic-UI frontend framework for example, with only minor styling tweaks to bring it on brand. But the thing still needs designing in terms of putting all the components together in a logical way. Having a well set up Sketch file with all the elements of Semantic-UI helps me speed up my workflow while also ensuring I stick within the constraints.

I can also see the use outside of that context when creating a big design system, but only really for the sake of smaller components. Having all buttons, fields, dropdowns, calendar pickers, etc all ready to go in well constructed symbols saves a tonne of time, and by editing just a few colours they can be full customised to the large majority of brands.

As a slight side note: they can be really useful to learn Sketch techniques, particularly in terms of how to best nest symbols and create components that are very responsive and customisable. They're largely created by people who are in the nuts and bolts of UI every single day, so as someone who's spread across UI/UX/Strategy I'm delighted to be able to work off their deeper expertise.

Hey man,

Wanted to share my experience. Currently using Figma to turn around designs quick in a startup whilst also simultaneously trying to:

1. Minimise future design debt while we work rapidly to get a product to market
2. Works cross-platform and cross-product
3. Has available react resources to help our developers work more efficiently

This came in the form of:

1. Free Material UI Kit resource for Figma - which I can use to spit out the UI for patterns quickly
2. material-ui.com - which has a large part of these components + interactions built out for our devs

--

Half my career has been split in agency and product and can't really find a use for a UI kit across multiple brands, I believe they're necessary when it's 1 brand across multiple applications when the brand meets some form of maturity.

Where do you get your UI kits from? I've tried a few from UI8, but found the quality to be disappointing.

I never used already made UI Kits, and I'm not really keen on starting. Instead I use what I call a UI Kit Methodology - I have a personal set of steps built over the years that I follow which include usage constraints, design constraints and development constraints which helps me focus on design.

I use them all the time.

1. For quick mockups/proof-of-concepts.
2. To fill-in nips and tucks, especially for MVPs.
3. For clients that don't have a budget.

Heck yes. Why reinvent the wheel? Though I rarely ever use them without customization or tweaking. Actually, I've never used one out-of-the-box. They save me and my team a ton of time as the components are mostly designed.

The counter argument is you still need to edit/tweak and this could actually take more time then creating from scratch, but I believe we still save time in the long run.

Time to time, yes but official GUI kits of Apple / Google are much more helpful for me actually.

I think the "wireframe" UI kits are the most useful, as I can easily spin up a bunch of wireframe options without worrying about styling.

UI Kits were incredibly useful while I was in school. These day's at work they're not as useful but I still appreciate them.

I use free UI kits, especially when I need to mock something very fast.

I use the goodies then design the rest myself :)

Apple or Google UI kits I use all the time. But design UI kit never. Don't really see the point since you're being paid to do exactly that, that's just being lazy or you don't have the skills, and looking from a client point of view, I wouldn't want to have a generic product or website.

I kinda understood them in the Skeu days where you're basically paying for someones artistry who knows how to make nice looking buttons or whatever. I can understand that someone has the skill to drag and drop a UI together but doesn't know enough Photoshop tricks to make these sort of controls.

But these days all you're buying is a bunch of colors and flat rectangles, I don't really understand what person would be able to make something with a UI kit like that successfully but not just make the elements themselves (excluding icons).

I use them very occasionally for design pattern inspiration or for visual inspiration. I've never used one as it's intended, as a drag and drop library for your project.

The initial draw of UI kits is if you need to work quickly. But you soon find that, as you mentioned, customising for your brand identity, your content etc leads to more work than actually just creating your own assets from scratch.

I don't see much any in a UI Kit for people who get paid to deliver design work. Maybe if your product doesn't have a designer?

Absolutely. I'm more developer than designer, so when I need to build a site quickly I love to use them. Designing slows me down, so I love just being handed something and doing what I know how to do.

There are two main types I use, an in-house UI kit and a third party one. When I was consulting with big enterprise companies I would often build a UI kit from scratch in Sketch to greatly accelerate the prototyping and mocking phases. Now that I'm back in a product company, it's the same kind of deal, only I've got more time now to flesh it out. What is the official, branded way of presenting x information, or y data.

With third party ones, I find they're only really useful as a consolidated Pattern Tap replacement. If I want to see some interesting ways of presenting a chat UI, I can generally find 3 variants per broad-based UI kit that are somewhat grounded in the real world. If I do the same search on Dribbble I will find a lot of unrelated tag matches, and a lot of fanciful, impractical ideas.

Sometimes, it is good to kickstart a project. When you need a visual concept to show it to the clients for pitches. The others are templates.

There are two kind of kits. One that works with the visual appeal the other one are template kits.

If i work for a company who has to build up a new system it would be worthy to have look on new template kits where you have the groundwork setup. You would have cheaper development costs and when the template is flexible enough to alter the design. The other ones are just visual comcepts where color fonts work in harmony, you know the drill.

Be aware some of them might look good but lacking of systematic or are complex to use and to unterstand.

I come to the conclusion to build my own template and habe all nessecary elemtns as template. I use kits to have a look on how others build up their systematic to learn an adapt it to my template. My goal is to habe a flexible template for my needs.

I'm biased because I'm one of those UI kit creators, but I absolutely could not do my job without the kit I've created.

I've used it every single day for 2 years for dozens and dozens of client projects. It has saved me thousands of hours of work.

The distinction I make between UI kits and what I call a starter kit is that my starter kit is much more akin to a boilerplate like Bootstrap.

I spent a ton of time perfecting the basic elements and components of a design system, constructing everything with styles and symbols. When I start a new project, it might only take me 20 minutes to customize the system to look the way I want it to look, then I'm ready to start building pages.

It's a fantastic place to start. It eliminates 100% of the set up work, and gets me about 90% of the elements and elements I'd ever need.

UI kits are usually overly stylized, or too designed toward a particular use case. If you're not designing that very specific music app, then it's a useless UI kit. And don't get me started on how poorly they're constructed from a layer/naming/organization standpoint. They're all show, but no support.

If you're interested, can check out the system I designed called UX Power Tools.

We're gearing up for a massive update in the next week or two with detailed documentation and usage examples...all tied directly to symbols and styles. As you make updates to colors, fonts, and symbols, 35+ pages of documentation update automatically.