UI design planning
UI design planning translates flows and stories into concrete screens: layout, hierarchy, components, and the states each element must handle. At this stage you are deciding what the interface should be — not yet building it in code.
Why it matters
A clear UI plan prevents teams from improvising screens during development. It makes accessibility, responsive behaviour, and component reuse explicit before expensive implementation, and it gives content and engineering a shared blueprint.
Key ideas
- Screen inventory. List every screen across flows so nothing is forgotten.
- Per-screen plan. Layout, primary actions, components, and variants for each view.
- State coverage. Default, loading, empty, error, success — each component and screen should declare required states.
- Accessibility by design. Plan focus order, labels, contrast, target sizes, and semantics per screen (WCAG 2.2 considerations).
- Responsive behaviour. Note how layouts adapt across breakpoints.
- Cite upstream work. Every screen should trace to a flow and the stories it fulfils.
How it fits the pipeline
UI planning synthesises journeys and stories into screens, components, and states ready for implementation.
Common mistakes
- Planning screens without reference to user journeys
- Omitting error and empty states
- Treating accessibility as a post-build audit only
- Inventing screens for capabilities no story requires
Further reading (NN/g)
- — wireframes and prototypes as discovery outputs
- — connecting maps to design decisions
- — accessibility, layout, and interaction patterns
Educational summaries informed by research published by Nielsen Norman Group.