Components – the organs of user interfaces

This quote by Stephen Hay from BDConf in Orlando 2012 brings it to the point. Interface design is really not about pages. To create efficient user interfaces for not only the users but also the developers who maintain them, we need to think in systems of components. Components are independent, but they can interact with each other and create larger components when they are arranged together. We need to look at user interfaces holistically, and using components enables us to do this.

In the following topics, we're going to explore a few fundamental aspects of components. Some of these are already known from other concepts, such as object-oriented programming (OOP), but they appear in a slightly different light when thinking about components.