In recent years we’ve seen an explosion of web applications. There are a number of different web apps for various customers and use cases. When building any web application, it’s extremely important to make sure it has user friendly features. Otherwise customers will go to a competitor. Always assume that users can easily find alternative to your web app. It will help you make it as best as It can be.

Without further ado, let’s discuss 5 features to improve user experience of your app.

Autocomplete

It is no secret that users hate typing. In fact, they don’t like doing more work than they absolutely need to. Therefore autocomplete is a perfect solution that allows users to easily fill out forms. Autocomplete can also help with accuracy of collected data. If users accept your autocomplete suggestion, then it’s more likely that they are submitting a valid value. Because your autocomplete option would not be an invalid value.

Expand / collapse

You have probably noticed that web applications are overloaded with content. This can be audio, video, text, or any other type of content. Most of the time, users don’t want to see a lot of the content on your website. Therefore it is crucial to help them find what they need.

Expand/collapse feature allows you to display a list of items with most essential information. If users are interested in a certain item based on its title or other important highlights, they can click on it to expand and learn more. This saves their time.

It’s fairly easy to implement expand / collapse feature in React. First, we need to create a state variable that contains a Boolean value. If it is true, then the content should be expanded. If it’s false, then your app should display only essential bits of information. Here’s an article that does a pretty good job of explaining how expand/collapse feature works in React:

https://simplefrontend.com/expand-and-collapse-react-component-list-div-text-examples/

Smart forms

Forms are an extremely useful tool for collecting user input. Features like form validation help you improve quality of collected data. You can use libraries like Formik to highlight input fields with invalid values and provide custom error messages to help users fix their mistake.

Sometimes you need to take users to a different page after they finish filling out the form. You can do that with react-router and the useNavigate() hook. There are a number of other routing libraries for React, but in my opinion, react-router is the best.

It’s also useful to clear form fields after user has submitted the form. In React and controlled components this is fairly easy to do. You need to tap into the onSubmit event handler and use the function provided by useState() hook. As you know, argument to that function will replace current state value. You can use it to reset the state to an empty string or null value.