Table Of Content
A successful design system needs to become part of an organization’s DNA, and since third parties exist outside the company’s walls, their influence is intrinsically limited. Typically, design system makers at smaller organizations will be senior-level staff who have the experience to make thoughtful decisions, and the authority to enforce the design system. That is just one example of how design-system thinking can lead to broader, more considered changes.
Design systems
The cycle repeats itself as companies push off minor updates until the next big redesign, ultimately paralyzing themselves and frustrating users in the process. When massive redesigns launch with significant changes to the experience, users get knocked down what Jared Spool calls the “Magic Escalator of Acquired Knowledge”. Huge redesigns are a jolt to the system, and newly frustrated users have to spend a great deal of time and energy relearning the experience in order to slowly climb back up that escalator of acquired knowledge.
Chapter 5
This, of course, can be a double-edged sword, as maintaining a consistent writing style for an organization with many voices can be challenging. Writing style guides provide every author some guidelines and guardrails for contributing content. To present itself in a cohesive way across a growing range of products and media, Google developed a design language called material design.
Make it approachable
But on the other hand, external parties can often provide a sense of perspective that’s hard to see while working inside a company. In my work as a consultant, I work with organizations to establish long-term design system maintenance strategies, and help get the right people and processes in place. While the long-term success of the system will ultimately be up to the organization, third parties can teach them to fish and provide important strategic guidance, feedback, and perspective. Say you’re working on an e-commerce site, and you run a test that finds a custom-styled dropdown menu on the product detail page isn’t performing as well as the browser’s default dropdown menu.
Atomic design is for user interfaces
” While holy grail systems are indeed great, there are reasons why you may not be able to automagically keep your production environments and pattern library in sync. Perhaps your organization creates tons of digital products on many different platforms using wildly different technologies. Maybe you’re a giant multinational company scattered all over the world.
With that work in place, the team can collectively begin styling specific patterns and refining the overall structure. Crucially, style tiles also reinforce pattern-based thinking by educating stakeholders about design systems rather than pages. Presenting color swatches, type examples, and textures exposes stakeholders to the ingredients that will underpin any implementation of the design system. With a few simple spreadsheet columns, we can articulate which display patterns should be included in a given template, and what content patterns they’ll contain. More importantly, we’re able to articulate each pattern’s relative hierarchy and the role it plays on the screen.
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If you’re dealing with change-averse stakeholders, I say do what you need to do and tell them to pay no attention to what’s happening behind the scenes. If you’re really lucky, you can parlay the initial project’s success into a more official initiative within the organization to evolve your design system. Establishing and maintaining successful interface design systems requires an organization-wide effort, and this chapter will discuss how to overcome human beings’ many quirks to make them happen. Perhaps the biggest, most unavoidable challenge is that style guides are time-consuming to create. I don’t know about you, but I don’t go into work every day twiddling my thumbs wondering what to do with my time. I’ve never met a person who isn’t feeling pressure to get work out the door, and this pressure naturally leads to focusing on the primary web project.
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It’s worth asking if this is a one-off situation or something that can be leveraged in other applications. The design system maintainers need to understand why and when to tweak patterns, how to go about making those changes, and how to roll out those improvements into individual applications. The three types of change that can happen to patterns in a design system are modification, addition, and removal. And then there are external agencies, contractors, and consultants. What is the role of a third party when it comes to long-term maintenance of a client’s design system? On one hand, external partners are at a bit of a disadvantage since they don’t actually work for their client’s organization.
As the last snowflake wilted from R/GA’s courtyard, rock salt burning it to smithereens, Brad closed his MacBook Pro and signed off for good. He knew that the web would always be fluid and the need to innovate how we design for it would persist. But for now, atomic design seemed like the best model.He was excited to move on to write and speak full-time about atomic design and other methodologies he picked up at work. More interestingly, when combined with other atoms, such as a search bar, your button atom can now actually help the user achieve something very real and functional. Perhaps you discover through use that a particular pattern is a terrible idea.
Rather than thinking of final applications as our sole responsibility, we must recognize that the design system is what underpins our final products and pattern libraries. We’ve already discussed the importance of resetting everyone’s expectations to establish a more collaborative, pattern-driven workflow. To save our style guides from the bowels of a trash can, we must once again fundamentally rewire people’s brains.
At the smallest level, you have atoms, which cannot be reduced any further. All matter, it turns out, boils down to these same core components. One way to demonstrate context might include showing screenshots or videos of a component in action.
Even third parties responsible for matching their UIs with the look and feel of a company’s internal UIs can make great use of a style guide. Externally hosted experiences like payment portals or localized sites can better match the look and feel of the primary experience by applying the styles defined in the guide. Voice is an elemental aspect of a brand’s identity, so typically brand identity guidelines include some reference to the brand’s voice. However, these guidelines usually aren’t very nuanced, which is why voice and tone guidelines are so important.
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