Table Of Content
Including front-end development as a critical part of the design process requires changes to both project structure and team members’ mentalities. Like style tiles, element collages are meant to facilitate discussion about the aesthetic direction of the project. It’s very clear these collages aren’t an actual website, but stakeholders can still get a sense of what the site could look like. Conversation about these element collages can give visual designers more ideas and direction about where to take the design next, and because of their lo-fi nature, designers can quickly iterate and evolve ideas.
Comprehensive content strategy
Atomic design is not a linear process, but rather a mental model to help us think of our user interfaces as both a cohesive whole and a collection of parts at the same time. Each of the five stages plays a key role in the hierarchy of our interface design systems. Templates are very concrete and provide context to all these relatively abstract molecules and organisms. Templates are also where clients start seeing the final design in place.
Remya Ramesh, Experience Design Lead, OpenCities - GovInsider
Remya Ramesh, Experience Design Lead, OpenCities.
Posted: Wed, 14 Dec 2016 08:00:00 GMT [source]
Necessary design elements
” are crucial questions to ask, and the techniques we just described can help designers discuss them effectively without making any layout or technical assumptions. The UX designer then passes the wireframes to the visual designer, who hops into Photoshop or Sketch to apply color, typography, and texture to the structured-but-sterile wireframes. In the design review meeting, stakeholders sit eagerly while the projector fires up and the project manager runs off to print copies of the design deck for everyone. The art director takes their position at the front of the room and unveils the design. Once the presentation is finished, the room quickly buzzes with feedback and conversation.
Design language
Scaling a design system for a telecommunications giant - TELUS
Scaling a design system for a telecommunications giant.
Posted: Wed, 04 Apr 2018 07:00:00 GMT [source]
The page stage is essential as it’s where we test the effectiveness of the design system. Viewing everything in context allows us to loop back to modify our molecules, organisms, and templates to better address the real context of the design. At the template stage, we break our chemistry analogy to get into language that makes more sense to our clients and our final output. Templates consist mostly of groups of organisms stitched together to form pages. It’s here where we start to see the design coming together and start seeing things like layout in action. In searching for inspiration and parallels, I kept coming back to chemistry.
I’ve found the three previous images to be a tremendously helpful shorthand for helping clients, colleagues, and stakeholders understand the reality of the web landscape. With this newfound understanding, everyone becomes a whole lot more receptive to updating their processes and workflows to create great work for this unique medium. Of course, there is another way to approach your Lego and digital projects. Rather than diving headfirst into constructing the final work, you can take the time to take stock of the available pieces and organize them in such a way that they become more useful.
Establishing direction
Pages are specific instances of templates that show what a UI looks like with real representative content in place. Building on our previous example, we can take the homepage template and pour representative text, images, and media into the template to show real content in action. While some organisms might consist of different types of molecules, other organisms might consist of the same molecule repeated over and over again. For instance, visit a category page of almost any e-commerce website and you’ll see a listing of products displayed in some form of grid. The result is a simple, portable, reusable component that can be dropped in anywhere search functionality is needed.
Chapter 4
The choice of text on a button, colors in the header, or the creation of a navigation bar, all complement each other. This helps in focusing on the needs of the audience in a much better manner, as the process starts at the very basic building blocks. The overall philosophy helps in bringing clarity to the design system. Public-facing style guides are also hugely helpful for recruiting.
Style guides help iron out these inconsistencies by encouraging reuse of interface elements. Designers and developers can refer back to existing patterns to ensure the work they’re producing is consistent with what’s already been established. Getting UIs to work across a myriad of screen sizes, devices, browsers, and environments is a tall order in and of itself. But once you factor in other team members, clients, stakeholders, and organizational quirks, things start looking downright intimidating. People interact with brands across a huge array of channels and media.
It’s important to set time limits on the screenshotting exercise to avoid going down a rabbit hole that ends up lasting all day. The amount of time you allocate will vary depending on how many people are participating, but I find between 30 and 90 minutes to be sufficient for a first pass of an interface inventory. Music (well, maybe not Jeopardy! music, but some other music that sets an upbeat mood for the exercise), and have the participants concentrate on screenshotting the unique UI patterns they encounter. An interface inventory is similar to a content inventory, only instead of sifting through and categorizing content, you’re taking stock of and categorizing all the components that make up your user interface. An interface inventory is a comprehensive collection of the bits and pieces that make up your user interface. As the number of people working on a project increases, it becomes all too easy for communication breakdowns to occur.
Just how we build things like performance, accessibility, and responsiveness into our products and process by default, we should also create design systems by default. You don’t need to get the client’s blessing to follow your craft’s best practices. When you give stakeholders the option to say no to something, they will. Our job is to create great work for our clients and organizations, and interface design systems are a means to that end. You have to start somewhere, and having something started is better than nothing at all.
It’s worth pointing out that things may not shake out the way you hoped. Despite demonstrating real value and presenting a concrete plan of action, higher-ups still might shoot your initiative down. Your team should continue to grow and extend the design system in whatever capacity you can until its value becomes undeniable. As more people benefit from the system, you’ll end up with a grassroots-supported system that can help push the endeavor through. This “design system first” mentality inserts a bit of friction into the maintenance process, and that friction can be friendly. It forces us to step back and consider how any improvements, client requests, feature additions, and iterations affect the overall system rather than only a sliver of the whole ecosystem.
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