Mendix releases Atlas UI

Mendix has announced the general availability of Atlas UI. Integrated into its low-code platform, Atlas UI enables developers without front-end development or UI design skills to create engaging, and highly usable user interfaces. With Atlas, an organization's UI/UX team can define a standardized design language to promote design best practices across multiple, autonomous development teams.

User experience design is critical to app adoption and successful business outcomes, but many IT organizations lack sufficient resources to deliver great UX across their app portfolios. According to a Gartner survey, 'On average there is one UX designer for every 17 developers, with 35 percent of respondents indicating that they have no UX design competency at all.' With limited UX resources and the shift towards smaller, autonomous development teams, consistency of user experience can become an even greater challenge.

The Mendix Atlas release aims to close this UX gap by combining a layered, componentized UI framework, designed to capture and leverage UI design patterns and best practices, with a new what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) Web-based modeling tool. This combination allows developers without UI design skills to quickly assemble and deliver great user interfaces leveraging ready-to-use UI elements that incorporate design best practices.

UIs are constructed through a combination of navigation layouts, page templates, building blocks (preconfigured assemblies of UI components) and widgets. Atlas templates and building blocks not only accelerate UI creation; they assemble widgets in pre-configured layouts with optimal proportions, spacing and individual design properties. The resulting app's visual style automatically reflects a selected visual theme - either one provided by Mendix or a custom theme created with the new Theme Customizer. This collection of design elements is ready to use in responsive layouts, ensuring that Atlas-based UIs transition gracefully across device form factors.

'Usability is more important than ever to ensuring custom applications deliver their intended business value,' said Johan den Haan, CTO, Mendix. 'While an iterative, user-centric approach to app design and development has been built into the Mendix platform from the very beginning, Atlas UI takes these concepts to the next level. For enterprises adopting low-code platforms, Mendix uniquely enables a broad range of users to create beautiful, highly usable apps at speed and scale.'