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Accessibility with Marcy Sutton – The State of the Web

Post author By Jimmy Dagger
Post date August 25, 2020
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”. My guest is Marcy Sutton Head of Learning at Gatsby and former Developer Advocate at Deque Systems and today we’re talking About web accessibility, Let’s get started: [ MUSIC PLAYING ], So Marcy thanks for being here. What exactly does Accessibility mean MARCY SUTTON To me. It Means building websites that include people With disabilities, both building for People with disabilities and with people With disabilities, including them as Stakeholders hiring them to work on our teams.

Paying them for their work to review things. For accessibility and give us feedback Along the way, RICK VISCOMI, So when a Website isn’t accessible. What’s at stake, MARCY SUTTON A lot! If you think about how many Services are moving online if accessibility isn’t Built in then, it could present Barriers for people with disabilities, where They can’t use the service They might give up and Leave or worse, it might cause harm to Them if they have something like a traumatic Brain injury or seizure risk So there’s actually Quite a bit at stake if the web isn’t accessible, RICK VISCOMI, So even with The Domino’s lawsuit recently that came out where They lost their appeal.

Do you think that Websites will actually have a push towards more Accessible websites, especially now that lawyers Realize the legal risk MARCY SUTTON In The United States legislation can certainly Help and people can lean on the Law in this country to enforce their civil rights, So having rulings like The Domino’s ruling could potentially Help since there has been an absence of rulings, In favor of including websites under the Americans, With Disabilities Act, but I think there will be More to read in that space I have seen and read and Heard about companies looking at competitors, That have been sued and sort of feeling like Oh, maybe we’re next, so there can be some Market pressure, if there are legal actions being taken And if that’s what it takes, To make something accessible, then I think that’s moving.

In the right direction, RICK VISCOMI, Where do The breakdowns typically happen when a website Becomes inaccessible, Are the managers just Not buying into it Are the developers unaware Of the importance of it, lack of developer Tools all of the above MARCY SUTTON, I think It’s mostly an education issue and awareness, So to sort of try and Solve this problem, I advocate building a Culture around accessibility, so that everyone at the company Is involved and invested From project managers to Designers and developers, we all have a part to play in Making the web more accessible – And it is true that A lot of people just aren’t aware of the Impact that they could have There’s also the misconceptions That accessibility is costly and maybe not worth it.

It’s too niche of an audience, But actually it can improve. Things for a lot of people, If you think of it in Terms of inclusive design, the benefits that we Put into our websites like keyword, support, improving Contrast and font size those can help a lot of people, So it’s definitely worth it. And it’s easier and less costly. If you do it from the beginning, RICK VISCOMI. Is it something –? 10 % of the population has Some form of disability, so it’s more than niche, It actually affects A lot of people, MARCY SUTTON – I think it’s More than that, actually one in five people – RICK VISCOMI, Oh wow, MARCY SUTTON And the range of Disabilities is pretty wide, so there’s all Kinds of scenarios that people can be Browsing your website and they might have situational Or temporary disabilities People are born With disabilities There’s a whole spectrum of How people use the web that’s really kind of beautiful And if we can Embrace that, like we did with responsive Design and letting go of some of that control.

Over pixel perfection and how the user actually Visits our website there’s some real opportunities. There to innovate and make things that are way more robust, RICK VISCOMI. What did you Mean by situational disability, MARCY SUTTON, If You break your arm if you have a baby in one arm. Or a cup of tea or coffee, you might hold your Phone in a different way or have to switch arms If you are born with Something like that, you might permanently not Be able to use your arms, And so you have to use other Input modalities like voice, or maybe you use a joystick With your mouth or something And so there’s new Devices and ways of navigating that don’t rely.

On the default of perfectly working limbs and the abilities That most people, think of So there are some Opportunities and people are pretty resilient. They figure out ways. To navigate the web And if we can Support them better, then that’s pretty awesome, RICK VISCOMI That Reminds me of Android Auto, where, if I’m driving My car, my phone, is not necessarily a thing. I’r putting Right directly, in my face So their way of Interfacing with devices changes entirely depending On your situation, MARCY SUTTON, Yes and a Lot of those technologies were developed for People with disabilities, so it’s worth Considering that, maybe some of the things that We appreciate, and we can use every day were invented.

For people who needed it, RICK VISCOMI, I want to go back. To something that you mentioned earlier about having Users with disabilities, or even people with Disabilities on your team, as part of the Development process, How can you implement Accessibility as part of the Process in a way that ensures that the website’s Going to be accessible, MARCY, SUTTON Well, Certainly including people on your teams to be Stakeholders and provide feedback in regular intervals.

That would be the best way. Is to have people embedded on your teams who Have disabilities mainly because they Have experiences and perspectives that, as Able-Bodied developers, we just can’t make that up. It’s not your lived experience. So having that feedback, all the Time would be truly valuable And people get to Work on your teams and you pay them for Their work and I think that’s a really good way to go: RICK VISCOMI, How about Part of the design process, If a website, for example, Is built to be entirely using Canvas or Flash or Something if people have a specific technology, In mind where it’s just never going to be accessible, How can you actually prevent that from happening Where, in the design Process, do you actually make those decisions? To be accessible, MARCY SUTTON, I think Having some requirements about how users should be able To navigate the site should definitely start in design, I mean hopefully you’re Not getting too locked down on a given technology, — RICK, VISCOMI Hopefully not Flash MARCY SUTTON — in The design phase Yeah Flash no way But Canvas –.

There have Been whole websites built with Canvas And accessibility Unfortunately, was an afterthought in A lot of those cases – And we do have some Standards for Canvas that are better than They were four years ago, but you still have To re-implement a lot of native Functionality that you would get for free if you used The DOM or the Document Object Model RICK VISCOMI. Are you referring To the Accessibility Object Model, MARCY SUTTON, No, So with Canvas.

If you Provide fallback content, there’s a method called Draw focus if needed, You can pass off some Of these interactions from the two-dimensional Canvas Which is essentially a bitmap to that fallback content. And try to create some sort of a Semantic experience, but that’s a lot of work And if you can use the Document Object Model which does feed into what’s. Called the accessibility tree –, which is a fancy Term for a structure with accessibility, information – –: you can do a lot and Communicate to users of assistive technology, What’s going on on the screen, RICK VISCOMI, What’s the Current state of accessibility in developer tools, Either in the browser or as part of testing MARCY SUTTON, Pretty Great actually From when I got started as a Front-End developer everything for accessibility in terms Of this accessibility tree that I mentioned all Of that information was sort of hidden Under the hood And you had to go, Crawl through the Dom and go look at what was on The page and sort of just know what was going on there And now we have developer tools.

Like in Chrome and in Firefox, and it’s amazing how much you Can learn about accessibility through those tools? It would be great to Have more but we’ve come a really long way. Both with built-in dev tools and browser extensions, And automated tools, so I think the future is pretty Bright in terms of tooling RICK VISCOMI, What was your Experience with axe-core and what did it do? Marcy SUTTON, axe-core Is an accessibility API written with JavaScript? It’s an open source library that I used to work on full-time And it’s used in both Lighthouse And Accessibility, Insights from Microsoft, so it’s sort of An engine and a common rule set for testing accessibility And its used a lot of places.

It’s pretty cool, There’s other APIs. As well like WAVE and some others that aren’t Coming to mind at the moment, but it’s nice to have a common Set of rules and the engine that people can Count on and they can use it in different ways: Such as in browser extensions and in automated tooling To use a common rule set so that some Testers on your team aren’t using a different set. Of rules than the developers, for example, Because then you’re working Off two different sets of requirements, and it can Be hard to meet in the middle RICK VISCOMI You had Mentioned that axe-core’s integrated with Lighthouse The HTTP Archive runs Lighthouse On 5 million websites, so we can get some Of that analysis from axe-core aggregated To the scale of the web, I actually have a few stats, So 22 % of web pages tested Passed the color contrast audit from axe-core 50 % of pages are passing the Lighthouse image alt attribute being present audit, So it’s kind of surprising To see how low accessibility adoption is in certain Areas of the web and having a tool like Axe-Core is just really great to be able to get That visibility, MARCY SUTTON, Sadly It’s actually better than I expected RICK VISCOMI That Is pretty sad, MARCY SUTTON? It is sad Yeah, it’s depressing.

There is a project from WebAIM Called The WebAIM Million, where they ran the WAVE automated tool. Against the top 1 million home pages – And that was also a Very sad set of results because, as an industry, We have a lot more work to do a lot of work to Do to make that better Tools are helpful. In highlighting some of these low-hanging fruit, Things that we need to fix. But if we look at It in aggregate the picture is not very Pretty at the moment, RICK VISCOMI You Co-Authored “ Smashing Book 6” with your chapter titled “ Accessibility in Times of Single-Page, Apps.

”. So in what ways do accessibility, And single-page apps not play well together: MARCY SUTTON, Quite A few, unfortunately, I mean all of the Basics of accessibility apply if you’re building A website that’s heavy, with JavaScript So things like image, alt text and color contrast, But when we have this Javascript layer, that’s taking over a lot of The interactions that would be happening, In a web browser, we have to do a bit more To support users who are navigating with Assistive technology and using the keyboard Things like focus management, making announcements Using unobtrusive motion, If we’re using a Lot of JavaScript to try and delight Users, we have to try not to cause Harm with those But I’d say, probably the Focus management piece is the biggest Thing that we have to handle because If the browser is not refreshing, the page When the page changes a user using a Keyboard might be stuck in the prior part of The screen, or they have no idea what happened – If they’re in a screen reader or something So we have to manage Their experience going through the Application and that can be pretty cool.

Actually, I think it’s another area, That we can innovate And I’m hoping that frameworks And potentially browsers could help make this easier, So that would be a good space. To try and move the needle a bit to support developers without Them all having to re-implement all of the same things: RICK VISCOMI, Even kind of More of an old-school UI component, like modal dialogs Has its own focus problems? Can you describe some of The accessibility issues with modal dialogs and What’s being done on the HTML standard side to fix that MARCY, SUTTON Sure yeah, So modal dialogs are An example of some of these same Things I was talking about with focus management, So you have a layer that Opens up over the screen, It probably has content Behind it, maybe a screen curtain to gray it out When that modal opens, you Have to send focus into it, so the keyboard user Or screen reader user is in the right.

Part of the page they’re not left behind The modal window, So that means that you Also need to disable any interactive content. Behind that modal window and that part can Get pretty tricky You have to do some DOM Walking potentially set aria-hidden and tabindex On interactive controls and most people are not Going to do that DOM walking It’s hard. It’s expensive performance, Wise and you have to do it –, you know every time the modal Opens walk it down and –.

It’s like you’re doing it. In inverse both directions, So what would be great Is in the standard space, if we could have Something like HTML inert. It’s an attribute that Was proposed a while back, I think it was at Risk of being removed – and nobody is convinced, That we really need it. This is me officially Saying yes, we need it because the alternative Is a lot of DOM walking that, frankly, very little People are going to do So.

What that would do for us Is make it a lot easier to set a Boolean attribute in Html to effectively disable whole subtrees of the HTML Dom And that way when we send focus into a Modal, we don’t have to do as much in the background. It helps to have Sibling elements, so maybe the modal and the Content behind it are siblings. That way, you can just turn Off all the other content, So that does take a bit Of work from the developer to structure their DOM that Way, but that attribute would solve a whole Lot of pain, as well as the dialog element in HTML, That’s another one.

That’s At risk of being removed, I think it’s Firefox At this point that we need to implement dialog That could give us some of this Behavior for free, like focus management having a Semantic HTML element that would tell users of Assistive technology that it is a dialogue, So there’s some Patterns here that — to have every Developer in the world have to re-implement the same Things over and over again, it seems like we should Have some more primitives for making that easier, RICK, VISCOMI Yeah That sounds super important MARCY SUTTON And complicated [ CHUCKLING ], RICK VISCOMI, You’ve advocated In the past, for something called an accessibility, Statement, What is that, and why is that? So good for accessibility, MARCY, SUTTON, Accessibility, Statements are great tools, no matter what kind of a website You’re making, whether it’s with heavy JavaScript or not So an accessibility, Statement is generally a page on your website.

That’s easy to find: maybe it’s linked. Your website footer, and it has things Like what you’re doing to improve accessibility, Maybe what level of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines? That you’re aiming for It’s nice to have that Goal and that target whether or not you’ve Actually met it, but you have to keep actively Working at that to improve You can also collect Any accessibility, tips or information about Keyboard shortcuts or ways to use your website For accessibility and ways for users To contact you, That’s one of the Most important pieces having an affirmative Statement that says: hey, we might not Be perfect at this, but we’d love your feedback.

And get in touch with us And if people do Act on that feedback, So it’s opening That conversation to bring people in and Make them feel included and give them a way To give you feedback, Because a lot of These websites that have glaring Accessibility issues: we have no way to contact them, So you might see some tweets Of people calling out companies because they can’t use the Website or the service, Maybe an update to the Website or application breaks, what used to work? So if you have That statement it gives people a way to contact You in an official blog so that you can act On that feedback, RICK VISCOMI, It must be really Reassuring to go to a website and see that they actually Care about accessibility, MARCY, SUTTON, Absolutely RICK, VISCOMI, So What resources would you recommend for Web developers, who want to learn more about Creating accessible websites, MARCY SUTTON, So many –, The A11Y Project, Is really great? There’s an accessibility, Course, from Alice Boxhall and Rob Dodson at Google, on Udacity, I have a page on my website.

It’s MarcySutton.Com, There’s a web accessibility. Resources guide there and I collect things like Books and tools and articles and things that I refer to a lot There’s quite a bit out there. From companies like WebAIM, They have really great articles Deque. My former employer has A thing called Deque University: They offer free Accessibility, training to people with disabilities; Which is really great So there’s definitely a wealth.

Of information out there Just getting it to the people, To solve this education problem is sort of the gap that We need to figure out RICK VISCOMI And how About No Mouse Mondays, or what do you call it? Marcy SUTTON? Yes, I released an npm Package this week to sort of put a tool in the Hands of developers to turn off the mouse cursor for everyone, It was sort of a Joke but it actually could be useful as a Dev tool so something to pull into your Project maybe one day a week to actually have a No mouse day of the week, RICK VISCOMI, That reminds me Of 2G Tuesdays or something to get the feel for Slow performance, MARCY, SUTTON, Yeah, RICK VISCOMI.

I think That’s a good idea: MARCY SUTTON Yeah, It’s sort of a Chaos Monkey Approach to things of you know, if you Unplug, your mouse or don’t have that capability. How resilient is your design? Can you actually use it And some of the most Glaring accessibility challenges I see are with color Contrast and a lack of keyboard access, So if we could Somehow, culturally, build in tools and processes. To get us thinking about that, that would help So the No-Mouse Mondays is the First experimental version, but I have plans for it: RICK VISCOMI, It’s a good idea, All right Marcy.

This has been great Thanks for coming on the show MARCY SUTTON. Thank you. So much for having me RICK VISCOMI, You Can check out links to everything we talked about? In the description below, Thanks for reading and We’ll see you next time, [ MUSIC PLAYING ]

Tags axe core, Chrome developers, deque, deque university, dominos, GDS: Yes;, google chrome developers, Google Developers, lighthouse accessibility audits, Marcy Sutton, no mouse days, Rick Viscomi, smashing book 6, state of the web, the a11y project, the state of the web, web accessibility, webaim, webaim million

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Accessibility with Marcy Sutton – The State of the Web

Post author By Jimmy Dagger
Post date August 18, 2020
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Tags axe core, Chrome developers, deque, deque university, dominos, GDS: Yes;, google chrome developers, Google Developers, lighthouse accessibility audits, Marcy Sutton, no mouse days, Rick Viscomi, smashing book 6, state of the web, the a11y project, the state of the web, web accessibility, webaim, webaim million

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Web development on Chrome OS (Chrome Dev Summit 2019)

Post author By Jimmy Dagger
Post date August 10, 2020
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Today, I’m going to talk about web development on Chromebooks. Here is a quote from you. A skilled web developer. Chromebooks are awesome and, if you don’t remember saying this recently, I hope that after reading this article, it will become a daily thing. Chromebooks are known for being lightweight fast, secure web browsing machines.

They are so much more. The device portfolio has grown to include tablets, detachable z’, all-in-one, mini desktops and, of course, laptops and convertibles. Many of these are capable development devices. So what can you run on them? Well, ideas like visual studio code, Atom, webstorm tools like node, react, docker and get, and you can test your web apps with multiple browsers, including real mobile browsers as well.

You can check how your mobile app interacts with your web server all right on the same device. Okay, let’s get started and get your Chrome OS device ready for development. We are going to set up a Linux environment and then install the tools you need to start open, Chrome settings and search or scroll down to Linux. Click turn on this will download and setup a Linux environment when it’s complete, you’ll see a terminal prompt pro tip.

If you will be doing a lot of development, pin the terminal by right-clicking and choosing pin now we have a Linux environment. Let’s install some tools head over to the visual studio code website and download the Linux dot de Bie package, double click and choose install once it’s installed. You can find vs code in your app launcher. If you’re going to be using this IDE a lot, you can pin it like, we did with the terminal.

Any application with a dot de Bie package can be installed in a similar way. Let’s install atom, the process is exactly the same: download install and launch not every app has a dot de Bie package, but you can install any of your favorite tools that support Debian Linux, for example, to install sublime text, follow the Linux instructions on the website to Setup, the apt, repo and install the editor using the command-line when we install node in a few seconds, we’ll take a closer look at command-line installation and the same thing goes for apps like webstorm.

Just go to the website, follow the Linux download and install instructions. I won’t do a web storm right now. Let’s get right on to the server side of things, oh and by the way, at the end of this article, I will direct you to a page by the Chrome, OS Deverell team, with installation instructions for all the apps and more discussed in this article. Now, beyond what I mentioned today in this article, if your favorite tool is supported in Linux, it should run on Chromebooks.

For example, I, like G edit for text, editing FileZilla as an FTP, client and Inkscape for vector, graphics, editing. Today, web development usually takes more than a text editor an IDE or an FTP client. Let’s get to some other tools, so we can make some really nice web apps nodejs requires GnuPG to open up your terminal and install it with apt that command is sudo apt, install GnuPG 2. If you’re new to apt, you can probably guess that by replacing GnuPG 2 with whatever package name you want, it will install that package now.

Finding the right package name can sometimes be the tricky part note, as we continue with this article and other terminal commands. I won’t read every line out loud, but, as mentioned, I will provide a link at the end that has them all now that the dependency is installed. Let’s get nodejs run this curl command, followed by another apt, install command for node. That’s it. No js’ is ready to go, don’t believe me! Well, let’s try it out with procs use git to clone the procs repo an NPM to install, build and serve the proxy web app navigate to localhost 8080 in your web browser and check it out pretty cool.

So much minesweeping to be done. Let’s try react using NPM, you can install, create react. App, then use create react app to create a skeleton project. Here I call it hello. World react navigate into the directory where it was created and call NPM start now, navigate to localhost 3000 in your browser and check it out. If you prefer angular install that too, the steps are almost the same again. We use NPM to install at angular slash CLI, create an angular app using ng new.

My angular project change directories into the project folder using CD for change directory. My angular project now ng serve browse to localhost 4200 and check it out here. You’ll notice that I have procs a react, app and an angular app all running on different ports, all on the same Chromebook. I think this is pretty handy. What’s more, this is all local. So as long as your tools are already installed, you could do all of your development offline say like on a plane.

What about docker, no problem again we’re going to follow the normal Linux installation steps. First, we double check that all the dependencies are installed. We add the docker repository to apt and then we update the apt package list. Since we just added a new repository. We use sudo apt update to do this, then install docker test it out by running hello world. This is done with sudo docker run hello world.

You should get a nice mess showing that everything is working. Let’s do something a little bit more advanced by running an Ubuntu Linux container and docker sudo docker run it Ubuntu bash and there you go. Your output is going to look something like this in the Ubuntu container. I’ve taken a look at the OS version with cat, slash et Cie / OS version, and you can see it’s really Ubuntu now, once an app is ready to deploy, it should be tested because Chromebooks have web Android and Linux.

You can test across multiple browsers on multiple platforms: alright, on the same device, let’s install a whole pile of browsers to prove this point using the terminal in apt. You install Firefox for Linux note in debian the package name is Firefox ESR. Then, let’s also install the chromium browser for Linux feeling brave. Let’s install the brave browser for Linux. I won’t walk through all of these lines right now, but again they are just the standard installation instructions for Debian Linux.

We install the GPG key. We install the repo and finally brave now if for browsers, aren’t enough, let’s add a few more head over to the Google Play, Store and install some Android browsers. Let’s go with Firefox for Android opera for Android and Chrome Beta for Android. We now have seven browsers installed, which can give us a reasonable first attempt at test coverage. We have the Chrome, OS Chrome browser three Android browsers, that is Firefox Chrome, Beta and opera, three Linux browsers Firefox for Linux, brave and chromium, and here you can see that our procs web app is running on all seven one.

Last thing to mention in case you have a mobile app that interacts with your web service. You can do Android, TBWA and flutter development on Chrome OS devices, which means you can build and package your mobile app on your Chromebook test it right on the device. You were coding on, like any other Android app build your web component, start your web server and then test everything on multiple browsers and see how it interacts right on the device.

Android studio is as easy to install as visual studio code or atom head over to the Android studio site and download the dot de Bie file. Then you can code. Your app like you’d expect an Android studio with one cool difference: you’ll notice that you can push directly to the Chromebook you’re working on pretty cool full instructions on how to set this up can be found on the link. At the end of this article on the android page, so with your chromebook, you can build web apps with the tools you are used to develop and test right on device with tools like nodejs docker and angular tests across multiple browsers, including mobile, browsers and even test Mobile app and web interaction right on device, and all of this could even happen offline like on a long flight.

So now, don’t you agree. Chromebooks are awesome, as promised. Here is a link to a guide to get your Linux environment customized. Just the way you like. It’s cross dot, page dot, link slash web dev. Thank you can’t wait to see what you build.

Tags #ChromeDevSummit, CDS19, Chrome Dev Summit, Chrome Dev Summit 19, Chrome Dev Summit 2019, Chrome Developer Summit, Chrome Developer Summit 19, Chrome Developer Summit 2019, Chrome developers, Google Chrome Dev Summit 19, Google Chrome Dev Summit 2019, google chrome developers, Google Developers

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Accessibility with Marcy Sutton – The State of the Web

Post author By Jimmy Dagger
Post date June 9, 2020
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On the default of perfectly working limbs and the abilities That most people, think of So there are some Opportunities and people are pretty resilient. They figure out ways. To navigate the web And if we can Support them better, then that’s pretty awesome, RICK VISCOMI That Reminds me of Android Auto, where, if I’m driving My car, my phone, is not necessarily a thing. I’m putting Right directly, in my face So their way of Interfacing with devices changes entirely depending On your situation, MARCY SUTTON, Yes and a Lot of those technologies were developed for People with disabilities, so it’s worth Considering that, maybe some of the things that We appreciate, and we can use every day were invented.

Tags axe core, Chrome developers, deque, deque university, dominos, GDS: Yes;, google chrome developers, Google Developers, lighthouse accessibility audits, Marcy Sutton, no mouse days, Rick Viscomi, smashing book 6, state of the web, the a11y project, the state of the web, web accessibility, webaim, webaim million

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Learn How to Design — Designer vs. Developer #10

Post author By Jimmy Dagger
Post date June 8, 2020
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How did you manage to break through? So it’s not stopping you, but maybe enhancing the stuff that you actually do. I think one of the things that I always struggled with is that, from the visual standpoint like I’m, not a super talented visual designer I’ve seen some amazing visual designers that I’m just like. Oh, my goodness like that is really really slick, and I love that and that’s not like my strengths, and so I was a lot came back more from like the coding or a perspective being able to actually implement some stuff in code which they couldn’t.

But you know there was this kind of this deciding factor realizing. Am I more of a designer or more of a developer like you know, I’m not necessarily that great at graphics, but there’s still so many other ways of design that can kind of spread in so really like doing some research and finding about more about UX design And realizing that is really kind of wondered what I wanted to focus on, it’s kind of what led me to that.

So it’s definitely was this kind of process of navigating through it’s like. Where do I fit in my designer and my developer, were you know from the first projects that I started doing you know a lot of time? I did a lot of websites and when people come to you, they go hey. We need a website built, they don’t necessarily say hey. We need some front-end developer to come and come do this, especially if you’re working with smaller businesses and clients.

So you do take on the designer and developer hat to kind of make that happen. A lot of developers are very afraid to learn about design. It’s like, as I get question question like if I was to write an article, the perfect article for the developers would be how to how to learn to design or how do you, then, which makes no sense to me, because learning to design doesn’t really mean anything. It’s just like what part of design you know what discipline of design but there’s still that question of okay.

What is the first step? That’s someone who wants to really as someone who’s gone through this process yourself. What was your first step to say? Okay, that’s it! I’m becoming a designer right, I think you know following a lot of design patterns at that time. I didn’t really understand that they were called design patterns right. You kind of you implement them in the site’s doing a lot of web work.

You kind of take on okay, the navigation menu. Where does that live and you’re following a lot of the patterns that have already been created, and so you kind of learn to explore through that, and then you know, testing out the site and realizing. Oh, this doesn’t feel right like something’s off, let’s, let’s work on how to make this better, but I think one of the the great things that can really help designer or developers wanting to go into design is looking a lot of like the material spec guidelines.

They’re. Actually really really helpful, because not only does it actually tell you hey here’s some guidelines of what to follow, but it actually doesn’t really got a good job of explaining. Why you’re doing that yeah exactly so. That actually is really helpful because then you’re able to understand. Why was this created like what was the thought process behind, adding potentially a bottom navigation, or why would you have a side side nav? You know it’s it’s really getting to kind of explaining that so you’re able to learn from learn from actually interacting with something and seeing how they’re doing it, but also getting finding out why they decided to do that, because I think well so much of design is Some it’s problem solving right, so so many people forget that when I think of design they think of the finished product, but there’s so many different stages of how you got to that finished product.

And so a lot of it being able to understand how someone was thinking through that really really helps you from a development perspective get into that design field of understanding. Okay, how do I get from thinking of? How do I develop this versus? How do I even arrive to the solution? I think that’s the that’s kind of the big difference there as developers. You know you have something. That’s already designed for you.

For the most part, I mean some people get handed things. Some people get handed an ios mock and said: hey make this and make this into android. So then, at that time you kind of become an Android design. In that aspect, what you think is like the biggest thing that stops developers really understanding design. One of the things that we do at Google is we do design sprints, so the design Sprint’s are really great because it brings people from all the different disciplines and such leads together to work into solving a challenge that we have.

You know. So you have product managers, engineers, designers, researchers, everyone in the room together and kind of thinking and working through a problem which is really fantastic because you get all these different ideas and one of the things that I really notice is where, as we’re bringing in designers, You know and engineers, and all these people together is when we’re walking through the challenge.

The engineers are already thinking of the solution, yeah and already thinking about how to implement it. They go straight to that which makes sense that that is their role right as engineers. Usually, you are given something and you have to go. Oh, how do i, how do I make this happen? How do like thinking through problem solving how to actually get to that solution where, as designers, we don’t know what the solution necessarily is? So I think a lot of the blockers is automatically wanting to know the answer yeah, instead of being more aware and being okay with saying you know, I don’t know the answer to that, but let’s let’s explore it together, yeah, so I think that’s the biggest hindrance That can really stop developers and to getting into design.

It is wanting to have all the answers. It’s it’s okay, not to have them I mean, and what do you think developers can actually do to get past? That I mean because I find like for me. It’s way sketching and just experimenting, and so I suppose, is how does the developer maintain that kind of playful space where they’re, not thinking right, here’s the library we’re going to use to do like or whatever widget or fab or whatever? But what can they actually do that allows them to to not thinking about like the end result or breaking from that cycle? Yeah, you actually bring up a great point with sketching.

That’s probably one of my favorite exercises when I’m working with different people to get them thinking of solutions. So if you’re developing an app or so is hey, let’s get some sketches out there get a sharpie and just start sketching out through some ideas, because that really that doesn’t you can really get some ideas on paper and not be merry to them. You know and not feel like really connected, because you spent all this time developing the solution and realizing.

Oh, it doesn’t really work, and so, if you start really low fidelity with some sketches that can really open up your mind in terms of thinking about different solutions. Because as you’re sketching through it you’re realizing, oh like maybe I want to use this fab button or something everyone loves fab right, so you want to incorporate it somewhere and then you realize hmm, maybe that’s not the right thing to do and I haven’t spent all This energy developing or even designing this, so then I can kind of toss that and move on and create a different solution.

So sketching, I think, is a great resource. Instead of people go straight, a lot of people like to prototype in the code, but I usually like to challenge people and go hey start, sketching some ideas and then once you’ve landed on something that you think you want to explore. Some more then dive into code or dive into sketch or whatever your you’re using. So I suppose for the engineer to really understand design.

It’s almost like okay, just start sketching first and start thinking about the thing you’re going to build and the possibilities, rather then straight to the in solution. One of the things I really noticed there was the way really good designers responded to constraints. You know you think about: I don’t like black and white photography or jewtown prints, whatever their responses to restrictions on the medium

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What’s new in Material Design for the web (Chrome Dev Summit 2019)

Post author By Jimmy Dagger
Post date June 7, 2020
No Comments on What’s new in Material Design for the web (Chrome Dev Summit 2019)

The first update is the material theme builder tool on glitch. The tool itself is a self-contained application that showcases each of the material components with prompts to update the base theme shown. It helps teams to leverage the three subsystems of theming within material typography shape and color.

The tool uses SAS variables to show users how to adjust an interface style and make their own brands shine by changing just a few lines of code within a theme file. For example, color can be adjusted via a series of variables, such as primary secondary background and surface colors. These compared with on colors, which represent the text color on top of a variable background, shape, customization, can be made for three component size classes, small, medium and large components.

Small components include buttons and input, medium components include modal’s and dialogs, and large components include menus and drawers, there’s a great shape tool on material diode to help you visualize. These changes on our components before applying them to your codebase and finally, we can adjust typography through the generalized MVC typography variable or through SAS maps that allow you to customize individual typographic levels, such as having a separate, wait and fought family for primary headlines, rather than The body copy in the end, your theme could look something like this.

This is just one example that comes from Google developer days in China. We’ve made thousands of themes around the world so far so head over ticklish. To add your own, we’re also working on a set of guidelines for adapting dark themes, using material components, for example, and a dark theme. Google materials, color palette reduces intensity to mitigate visual vibration or strong color contrast against a darker background.

Instead of solely adding drop shadows to illustrate elevation and depth and a dark theme, a lighter overlay is applied check out the material Daioh guidelines for more design guidance on how to transition your designs to a dark theme, considering contrast, depth, desaturation and limiting colors for accessibility To help with this transition, MDC web has released a set of typography theme variables that respond to background shades for text styles.

You can now also use the theme variables in three different ways. The most supported and robust technique is, with our SAS styling API, using variables and mix-ins to override styles. You can also create CSS classes, with the variable names to style them by and finally, for modern, browsers, CSS custom properties can be used for the theme styling. We’re still working on full support for custom properties.

At this time we provide so many options, because theming should not be limiting. You can extend the theme builder to make your own theme as unique as your product leverage our code and build on top of our material components to quickly and easily get started building product on the web. The next new feature and material is data tables. You asked we listened our designers consider these three principles when it comes to data tables.

The first is that data must be organized in a meaningful way. Data tables should also be allowed for user interaction, and, finally, those interactions should be as logical as a structure of the data table itself. Data tables come with some basic default functionality such as row selection, but you can also hook them up to other components such as these filter chips, check out the links provided below for a deep dive into how you can actually implement data tables in your web projects And combine material components for orchestrated actions.

We also have a new density subsystem option in material material design, uses low-density space by defaults with large tap targets and margins, but offers high density space when it improves the user experience. We brought density into our system for the following reasons: the first is for scan ability, scan ability is improved for data heavy applications with a higher density interface. The second is that dense UIs may actually help users focus by reducing space between Asians and, finally, more content is available to the user on a single screen in more high-density applications, whether or not to increase your us density can be determined by how users interact with A component components with high density, enable users to process and take action against large amounts of information in a more manageable way.

Lists tables and long forms are components that benefit from increased density, but density shouldn’t be used for every component. For example, don’t apply, density to components that involve focused tasks or alert. The user of changes such as snack bars or dialogues, applying high density to alerts reduces their ability to command attention. A series of new styling classes on the web allows for us to access density in three ways: the default component size a comfortable size which provides a higher density display, while respecting minimum touch, target size and compact, which may be used for pages.

With a lot of information but may be inappropriate for user actions, materials at i/o got an update as well. We now provide a cross-platform view of all of our component offerings on a dedicated components page. This page allows for quick access to components and an overview of cross platform. Availability should make it easier to navigate our product and implement it, for your needs, check out material, do slash components to browse them all yourself and finally, we’re kicking off a new initiative.

This year to focus on supporting material across web frameworks, why we know that most of you are developing web apps using a framework and the open source community has stepped up immensely, both in components for some of the most adopted web frameworks out there. We want to celebrate this work and help bring the material design vision to life along with our open source community. So many of you have already built your own wrapper libraries using MVC, webs components, foundations and adapters and we’re working more closely with the rest of the open source community as well.

We’ve updated material to i/o to link to three of the most popular open source component. Libraries they’ve already uncovered bugs in the material design guidelines and asked great questions, helping us to make material even better and we’re helping them to follow the spec and the material guidelines more closely as well. We look forward to continuing the conversation and working to bring the material design vision to every platform and framework, making it easier for everyone to use material design on the web.

There’s so much to explore and play with from theming to density, to data tables to new website features and our open source community. It’s an exciting time to be building of material, so check out material, dot, IO and the links below where you can find all the resources that I mentioned today can’t wait to see what you build material I’ll, see you on the web. You

Tags #ChromeDevSummit, CDS19, Chrome Dev Summit, Chrome Dev Summit 19, Chrome Dev Summit 2019, Chrome Developer Summit, Chrome Developer Summit 19, Chrome Developer Summit 2019, Chrome developers, Google Chrome Dev Summit 19, Google Chrome Dev Summit 2019, google chrome developers, Google Developers

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How We Designed Chrome – Designer vs. Developer #20

Post author By Jimmy Dagger
Post date May 27, 2020
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What you want? It’s always they want more and more, but they never use those things, and it’s really hard and quite brave thinks they know we’re going to script stuff away. There was internal talk about how chrome is built, and I think back to that time, where Internet Explorer was the dominant browser, Firefox was just was fighting and like the developer, tools were becoming quite prevalent and Safari was was, was just released.

I believe and Google designs to build a browser. So how do you start in that environment? Where there’s so much competition chrome was released in 2008 yeah, but actually we started on it in 2006, oh wow and the team at Google that started on Chrome was actually we were all working on Firefox. When I first joined Google, the beginning of 2005. The idea was to work on making the web better. One way to do that is work on making browsers better.

So we started out as a team working on making Firefox better a year and a half into it. We made the switch to actually building our own browser, and that was a big, big, complicated decision right, because you know we had already. We had been going down a certain path right. So looking back, I think or a number of factors right. First off we thought we could do a really good job, so that had to be true yeah, but also you know there were a lot of things about browsers in those days that I think created, frustrating user experience.

Yeah you got to go about going back 2006. You know applications like Gmail, yeah Maps and YouTube, and so on. These things were becoming popular and other folks were building complicated web applications like this and your typical browser. In that day, if you were to leave Gmail running overnight, you come back the next day and your browser to feel pretty sluggish and bogged down because of just the weight of these applications and so way back then we we had the idea.

That would be really nice to split up the browser into multiple processes. Right operating systems had gone through a revolution from the days of windows, 3.11 to Windows, NT and so on. Yeah we’re pre-emptive multitasking was the thing OS 9 to OS 10. Could we use pre-emptive multitasking? Could we take advantage of actually multiple processes on these systems for web browsing and seemed pretty pretty pretty like, actually seem possible? If you are thinking about a browser from scratch? Yeah I mean in terms of like the UX of again is like going back to the beginning of like browsers or the browser’s of that time.

It reminds me a bit like search before Google’s like search was basically portal sites and the search input field was like almost the most least important thing, but then Google came along. It’s like Nana, that’s the wrong user experience with when chrome came about. It was quite radically different because I know remember this phrase is a Content, not crime, yeah um, so just making that kind of UX decision of like you know, because it was all toolbars and remember when you install anything everything.

It’s all fact you back, then, is very common to find a user with internet explorer and they had installed multiple toolbars. So it’s not just one tool: Bartlett, multiple tours and there’s it’s great absurd. Screenshots of people was, you know those browsers had like five toolbars and it’s not a lot of room for the content right. So one of the things with Chrome’s content now chrome idea was to really remember that the whole point is people want to engage with the web application of the website.

The web content and the browser site try to get out of the way just facilitate helping. You use the web, and so even when we designed the extension system, we resisted the idea of having a first-class way or proper way to do toolbars or sidebars. We really didn’t want extensions over you really. You know using up screen space when that screen space to users really want that for the content. So we designed things, like extension buttons.

That would be the primary access point tried to guide things in a way that would um preserve that notion and even the UI of chrome itself. We tried to keep it very minimalistic. We you know we spent a lot of time in the early days. Thinking, if we’re going to introduce another browser, it’s got to be so awesome right, it’s got it and what does that mean? It’s got to have like the most amazing features.

It’s got it like have a whole new take on browsers. It’s got to be radically different. Ui, surely that would be the reason why we’re doing this right yeah, but in and we tried many different things: putting tabs on the side. You know fancy user gesture kinds of things, Mouse gesture types of things I mean none of that really felt right, and we can do that process. We came to realize what what actually we were doing and what really would set chrome apart is that as a browser, just works better yeah like creating software.

That’s not frustrating is actually hard to do yeah, and I think users appreciate it and so started to think about it, and what does that really mean for us? It was like all products should be pretty simple right should try to try to come up with elegant UI choices. Keep it simple: it should be performant but, like I said, browsers, browsers, have a history of being janky and not well-behaved, and and and you, the user has an expectation when they click on something, especially when it’s the chrome of the UI and when it’s the the Browser UI, they click on it.

They say close this tab. It should close right away yeah, you know par for the course. Those days was. You click close that click to close that tab, and you see you might see a beach ball on Mac, os10, yeah or nothing happens on Windows. You start to see the application not responsive problem right, but in chrome, because we went with this multi-process architecture. We were able to guarantee that if you click close on the tab, it’s gone yeah and those are examples of like responsive UI that you know.

Sometimes, when we talk about performance speed, we mean like how did welded perform on a benchmark, but a lot of times. It comes down to like was experience, smooth, responsive to the user input. Did it actually do what the user wanted it when the user wanted it, that kind of thing, so, simplicity, speed. We also put a big focus on security and stability, so we had these four s’s yeah, and that was the thing that we just repeated to ourselves: if you’re not sure what to work on work on one of those things.

Yes, work on making a simpler design work on making a more performant work on making it. You know more secure so and really with security we mean making it so users feel safe on the web. I feel in control of their privacy. They understand what’s going on, but also that it’s the system is protecting you from malware and so on and again our multi-process architecture not only helped us make something more performant, but also something more secure, a browser more secure and, finally, it helped a lot with stability.

We knew that starting from scratch, with a browser that might actually be the biggest concern, is it going to just crash? Is how do you? How do you exercise enough of the browser in your testing to know that you’ve got it right? We based the browser on not on Firefox, and we based it on WebKit, which is what, at those days that was Safari 2.0 Safari, 3 had just come out and WebKit Safari was known to not necessarily be the most compatible with the web right.

Modern web standards, driven by Firefox, were just becoming a thing. Internet Explorer has had a lot of quirks about it. Internet Explorer 6.0. A lot of quirks, especially thinking about like flowed yeah, that with the flow, though we had a box model. All these things were very impactful to like how web pages were built. If a developer was testing a lot with Internet Explorer, there would be the quirks that they would code to if they were testing.

A lot was Firefox we’d, see that and the Safari it was like. Well, probably, they weren’t testing with Safari, and so it was a big challenge in a big fear. When we launched Chrome, is it going to just crash all the time yeah? How are we going to? How are we going to manage that? So we put a lot of effort and in fact that same issue in forms like our choice of the user agent string. If anybody’s seen the user agent string of Chrome, it’s kind of hilarious because it mentions ever every browser ever since chrome came along.

And that was part of navigating this whole like does it work conundrum we always taught in software development and UX, add more features, because more features means more value, so I mean: was there ever pushback or was there like a fair, maybe we’re taking away too much From the browsing UI, we certainly ugly launched, and it originally chrome, without an extension support, and even the bookmark manager when was was, was revised quite a bit.

I’m going to post the initial beta things like this, so we we intentionally went with a very minimal approach, but we also really encouraged the team to try a lot of things with the idea that, knowing going into it that we would probably throw away things that Aren’t good yeah, that was the I don’t know the mantra if you will like. Let’s just try a lot of stuff and if it doesn’t work it’s okay, we just throw died, it’s not the end of the world.

We don’t have to ship everything we dry. I think that was really liberating and really helpful, because there were a lot of folks on the team who had different had had interesting ideas and and it’s empowering for people to try stuff. But it’s also, you know appropriate that we, we don’t just say because we built it, we should ship it looking back. What would you say were the best decisions you made and also for two part.

What would you regret in terms of like oh yeah, things that you did, that you’d wish you hadn’t? I mean you can also I’m an engineer. I was definitely an engineer at those days and I feel really good about some of the decisions we made. As an engineer from an engineering focus, you know we really put a lot of. We talked a lot about how important was that we were building a product, not building a platform.

I mean ultimately is a product that carries the web platform, but what I mean by not building a platform is that sometimes there’s a temptation as engineers to go off and build framework and and tools for creating the product that you’re actually there to create you. And we really resisted that a lot tried to make sure that we focused all as much of our energy on like actually building a browser which was very helpful to make sure that that that’s what we did so, for example, we said first we’re just building a Windows browser – and that meant, let’s just use win32 straightaway, all the Microsoft API is not looking for any cross-platform toolkit framework to build our UI.

Yes, one day we’ll bring this to Mac one day, we’ll bring it to Linux. You know, and so on, but like for now we’re just building a Windows application and when we went to finally build a Mac product a product for us 10, we told some of the engineers at Google. We said hey, you want to come work with us. We’d love for you to build the best browser for OS 10, and we want you to approach it. The same way that we approached building for Windows, which is all the UI, should be cocoa.

It should all be native, and we want you to have the freedom and flexibility to both embrace the native operating system primitives, but also move quickly as those primitives change, as the iOS evolves. So, let’s build a Mac focused product again with this idea that it’s we’re building product on a platform for building browsers, but what ends up happening as you do this and we did the same thing with Linux.

What ends up happening as you do this? Is you know we start to realize. We were coding same thing three times, yeah right and later on. Things like Android came along and iOS and Chrome OS, and so our world got a lot more complicated and what we ended up doing is, or is this arc from the singular I’m building a product to I’m starting to build platform things that helped me build that Product across and different platforms, yeah and that came afterwards – and I think that was actually somewhat healthy in a bit it.

To a certain extent. I kind of have some regrets that we built Chrome so much as a monolithic product. So while there is some code structure, that’s healthy and good, and – and there is somewhat of a layer cake, if you will there are – there – are some cuts that some some extra layers in the cake that should have been there. And now we have a lot of complexity because we didn’t make some of those cuts earlier.

We didn’t modularize necessarily as much as we should have. But again I think that came from that that focus some were just building this product and he does. I don’t need to be extra. We don’t need all that extra modular modularity, and now we find ourselves wishing he had a maybe done a little more, a little more forethought on that. What would you say, the decisions that were made that were actually really good to the success of a break, yeah yeah, so design examples in engineering examples.

There was this one one concept that was came up very early, which was – and we wrestled with this a bit. So the content area of a tab right, we started with the idea that there are some. We will actually have some browser UI that lives in the tab. So, for example, when you open a new tab, page there’s there’s some content shown to you, suggestions about things. You might want to do yeah. We started out building that natively and we started to find ourselves discovering an uncanny valley, because development users have this expectation that things inside the tab behave like web pages.

But building that not using web technologies meant that some things were subtly not right: yeah selection, behavior, wasn’t there context menus? Not there and the same. You know just things were subtly different, and so we scrapped that and we built the new tab page using web technology, and now it fit better everything we didn’t have all those little niggling little bugs you just felt natural. It felt natural it fit with the product.

On the flip side, we had some dialogues and some of those dialogues, mostly they were built natively, but a few of them were built using web and they never felt quite right, and so then we came to this. Discover that, like, let’s be opinionated about this, if it’s a dialog, it’s done natively and if it’s in the content area, it’s done with the tab, and then we avoid this sort of uncanny valley situation.

When chrome came out, there was a designing for best viewed in Internet Explorer, 6 yeah, and it’s interesting. You say like at the time. Webkit was not the priority of web developers. Now, we’ve shifted 10 years later, we’re seen best viewed in chrome or best viewed in WebKit browsers. So there’s this constant fear that we’re possibly entering back to the past, where, if, if, if development stops, then users and like the web technology becomes like a stagnant, oh yeah, that’s a great question.

I think that oh there’s a couple different things that happen with ie6 right, so, first off Microsoft stopped evolving the guys and we’re not stopping evolving api’s. We our mission, is to make the web better, and so it continued invest in that and the way we invest in that is, it’s very important to work with the standards community, the other browser vendors in particular and web developers, so that we get it right.

One of the dangers of shipping an API, if you’re the only one, only browser shipping it is that you might come to find that there’s a better way to do that. Api, yeah, a better design and then the end result is we’ll be tempted to ship. The new design as well the better design, but we won’t we’ll – have trouble leaving behind the old design so now we’ll ship, two ways to do something yeah or in the worst case three ways to do something.

If you look at CSS gradients, you will see. There’s multiple ways: yeah – and this comes from this – this this phenomenon. Where browser ships it early, then they learn that oh gee. I wish I’d done it differently and then they ship it that way too, and then oh yeah. I wish they would do it differently and they ship it that. Finally – and so you end up with a multitude of ways to do things in the web platform, gets really complicated and we don’t want the bad develop web developer to be thrashed by all of that.

Right, we want to keep it simple and make sure the api’s work well, so we want to do our do a good job, and that means spending time with other browser, vendors spending, time with web developers, learning understanding all the use cases and being very deliberate in The standards process, but we should still be able to ship something. Finally, and sometimes we do have to take some calculated risk yeah right.

Sometimes we are the first browser to ship an API, but we hope to do that in a way that stands the test of time, you’re looking for pain, points and you’re, trying to understand the why it is that people have these problems so that you understand their Mental model and you avoidable, designing in that way again.

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Developer tools for designers – Designing in the Browser

Post author By Jimmy Dagger
Post date May 21, 2020
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Today, we’re going to dive into the tools that browsers give us to quite literally design in them will be using chrome, dev tools, a material design as our baseline to see where we can adjust and play. Let’s dive in like design tools, developer tools, help designers and developers build test and debug in the browser.

Luckily, there are a ton of great tools and plugins that make this process of prototyping iterating so much fun. There are tools from everything from color selection to finessing animation, to ensuring a nice user experience on a variety of devices and even testing load at various network speeds. Dev tools help us not only to see under the hood but to also make changes and decisions and see what those decisions look like in the browser, the medium in which we’re delivering the final product.

That’s why the series is so important as designers. We have to work in this medium and use it to our advantage to really have the most control and power over our designs and what’s the first tool that we need inspect element. This is the primary entry of dev tools. Inspect element is often how I open up dev tools just by left-clicking, an element and finding that inspect item in the drop down, inspect element lets you select an elements and get information inside of it.

This information includes the Cascade of styles, styles on various States, computed values, classes, shape and size and more you can even change the text content in order, the Dom of the element within the elements panel. You do so like this, so here I’m going to left-click on this heading and hit inspect, and now I’m opening up this information here – and this is the elements panel you can see. The sizing here is 350 pixels by 32 pixels and Heights.

We have the class name here of headlines, 6 and all of the class styles inside of that. You can see here that this Moz OSX font smoothing, is not being applied in favor of the WebKit font smoothing. So it shows you which styles are being applied and which ones are being applied. We also can see here this h1, so we’re getting styles from the h1 as well as the clasp on top of it, and it shows you which styles are being overridden.

For example, this font size of 2 M is being overridden in favor of a font size of 1.25 bream with the class MVC typography headline 6. There’s also a variety of element classes that I can play with here, and I think that this is a really great way to prototype. So inside of this, if I started typing MVC typography, we get an autocomplete evolve, the different type of graphic options, so you can just sort of scroll through and start to see what these would look like within here.

So you can see that headline. One highlight two aren’t actually making a difference and that’s because I still have MVC headline six selected, so you want to uncheck that and now we can see what the headline two looks like. So if you truly want to play with a baseline for the styling here, remove all the classes and then start to search the classes that are relevant to this element. So here we can see all the typographic styles and decide which ones make sense.

This also lets you separate your logic from your styling. Your logic is the date of the text content here. So this is a header one in this form fields element, but you can apply a class on top of it to style it. However, you want say we want to style this headline, one like a headline: five or headline six. We can do that and we can test that inside of this elements panel, I’m going to select the button now so here I’m just going to hit inspect on the button and it’s going to go right to that element, and we can see that this button has A few classes as well so right now we’re using the MVC buttons raised style.

But here I could select this outline style as well and put that in there. You can play with density inside of buttons, and these are all classes that I’ve just sort of playing with earlier applying them, seeing what they looked like testing this in the browser. So it’s a really powerful tool and there’s a ton that you can do by changing. Some of these Styles around you can reorder things in the Dom as well.

I’m going to just grow back into my UI here so say we want this headline. Maybe after the paragraph we could do that we’ll probably want to change that to be not an h1. In that case, you know make sure that your Dom still makes sense, but you could reorder things you could reorder the buns. You could reorder this remember this device text there and really just start to play with your UI in the browser.

So here you could even change the text of what this says: I’m finding this label here and now I can change this to always Pat disco, and now I’m checking I’m always going to Pat disco. This is a place where you can test our front language if you’re unsure how a piece of text will fit into an element on your screen, then you can test that and you can test this at various sizes. Let’s look at the color palette now.

In this example, we have a custom properties based theme playground for material design if you click to inspect the page and we’re opening up that panel and inside the HTML. You can see this route here with all the custom properties and their color values. So here we can start to play with what our colors look like. So if I want to change the primary theme color, I could click on that square and I have this whole array of color here that I can start to pick and choose and play with and see what that looks like in my UI.

Maybe I want like a bright paint color here. You can also change the color type, so here’s the hex code, if I click on these arrows here it changes from hex to RGB a to hsla and speaking of alpha. You can also use this alpha toggle to toggle the Alpha, which is the amount from transparent to full color and how much will show through to elma behind it. So we have all of these capabilities and another fun one.

Is this color palette, so in this color palette we get a base palette of colors, but we can also start to pick color from the page. So you see these page colors here were the initial page colors. These color variable is that the dev tools have found from the page as most proud colors on that page. So, if you’re working within a design – and you have a pallet that you’re working with you – can easily find the colors from that pallet inside of this dev tool here, there’s also the CSS variables that are being pulled out here that we can get the color values From and we can just start to really play with color in this way so say I want this to be a bright pink.

That sounds good. Maybe we want to change the color on that primary here. We can also change this color value. We can change the we can change the secondary color value, so we can change this to maybe a purple value and you can start to see how this cascades throughout the entire application. So now, if I scroll through, you can see that all the secondary values, like the check boxes, the switches.

This is all live code and we can see that this is in the browser, transitioned and transformed all these elements to be pulling in those colors in the drawer. Here we see a background on the active elements and that is also pulling from the primary color but being all but faded behind, so you can still see a contrast with the text on top of it. So by applying these color changed in the browser, you can really see what that looks like in various elements and in various states of those elements.

So let’s go back to the top up here and select this button. What we can also do in dev tools is figure out if something is accessible or not, which is a really great shortcut to have so here on the button, we have a color value on a background, color value. If I click on this color value, you can see that we have a contrast. Ratio of 8.5 point 1, that’s great. If we made that color value a little bit more closer to the background color that contrast ratio starts to get lower and you can see that that’s no longer accessible.

So we get a lot of help here when you have a color and background color within an element to help us make decisions on contrast and on colors that are accessible for our users. If we click this open, we can see where that’s accessible. So we can see that’s accessible for double a for a larger text and not necessarily for Triple A which means that we will have to have that white value for it to be triple a contrast, accessible and for this to work for our users.

Make sure that you’re keeping accessibility in mind at all times and you can use the color palette inside of dev tools to help you to do that, especially when it comes to color selection and readability on various elements. Let’s talk about the animations palette in episode 1, where we talk about motion on the web, we recreated this wringing button. So let’s inspect this element in dev tools and explore what that looks like behind the scenes.

So here I’m going to hit inspect on this button. I want to make sure that I have the button selected here and then in the bottom. Here we have this animations palette. Now, if you don’t have this, you can find it in this drop-down menu, this little kebab menu and you can hit more tools in the drop-down and then animations is the first item in that secondary drop-down. So that’s what’s going to bring up this animations palette for us so now, inside of here we see that we have multiple animations happening.

If I click open on those animations, we can find that on the button we have this grow animation, where it’s growing over time and on the icon. Inside of that button, we have this ring and I can actually toggle back and forth between here like this. Is a keyframe, I can go forwards and backwards. I can pause. I can play I’m going to pull this up a little bit here. So what I can also do is I can adjust the time stamps.

These are percentage based animations. So if I wanted to make this grow really long, this will break up the effect of ringing as it grows, but just to show you, I now have it sort of off-kilter. It’s ringing its ringing still sort of not changing its size, so you can start to really break things down here. I have it ringing very tightly in this section here. I could break that up too. You can move these around, so I can move it back and forth.

I can have this start to grow before I have the ring happening, I’m ruining this animation, but the idea is to show you that you can have animations that are separate from each other and then also test what this looks like together. So now I have it ringing off kilter from the size changes, but here, if you have a lot of animations that are complexed and you have to orchestrate them together, you can take a look at what that is what that looks like you can take a look At what the animations are happening inside of this element, so we have a box shadow change to as its growing and changing color there and then start to play with this start to finesse in the browser – and this is a really great opportunity for prototyping, because if Things are off, it’s a lot easier to see it visually.

That is, to try to read the code and figure out what’s a little bit off when those time stamps are different too. If you want to slow this down to get a little bit more of a finesse and detail here, you can also change the speed at which you’re animating. So here I’ve set 25 %, and I have this very slowly now, starting to grow and shake here. Starting to ring very slowly so this is another opportunity for you to adjust speeds and see where things are in a very precise way.

10 % is another speed option for very complex animations. Again, you can start to really get in there in the details and intricacies of these animations. Let’s talk about the device panel. Now I use this tool all the time and we’re going to showcase it. I’ve opened up the material dot, IO websites and I’m just going to hit inspect from any part of the page to open up dev tools, and here is that device toggle toolbar.

So I could also hit command shift M on my Mac computer, but anywhere that you’re using Chrome. You could always, let’s click into the browser, screen and open up dev tools, so I’ve clicked this open here. I have a few options. I have a responsive option, so I could see what this looks like at various screen sizes by dragging it over. You also have a drop-down here with some default devices like the Galaxy s5, the pixel to excel, to see what this looks like at various screen sizes.

We have the iPad pro here and you’re also able to adjust this from horizontal to vertical. So you can see what that looks like when you flip that device. That’s a little bit more dramatic on a phone here. So if you flip that you get a completely different layouts, you can also again use this responsive mode. You can even edit what the devices are that you want to showcase. So here in the dev tools, I’m going to pull this out and going to hit edit, and I have a bunch of devices here – you can add a custom device.

You can add devices that aren’t currently in your drop-down by default. So if you want to test, for example, on the iPhone 4 or if you want to test on the Nexus 7, I will now have these inside the drop-down. When I next open it so there they are iPhone 4 and the Nexus 7 somewhere in this drop-down right here. So you can see that that focal looks completely different than that iPhone 4 and that’s important for you to know.

As a designer. We also have various breakpoints here that allow for you to just quickly change between common sizes, mobile medium, large tablet, sizes, laptop sizes, and you get a percentage based visualization here, that’s scaled down to fit inside of this browser screen. So if you want, you can make this 100 % view you can make it a even larger view. If you want to sort of zoom into that, you can make it 50 % sort of fit in this area, and then you can see really large screens, 4k screens you’ve.

Even and if you don’t have a 4k screen, you can still test on those devices. Your design does change, based on the DPI of your screen and kind of is determinate of whether you have a Retina screen or non-retina screen, and that can also come into play when you’re deciding what images to send to your users. So if you want to test those, I have an example here with disco right how this high-res image and now inside of my dev tools, I can actually test to see that I’m sending a lower res image with the lower resolution browsers in my CSS.

I have a media query where I’m sending a different image based on the density of the screen. So here, if I have a high density, Retina screen, I’m sending a high resolution in and if I don’t it’s going to fall back to this low resolution image. So I can actually test this with a medium dpi screen inside of my dev tools, and this becomes really useful if you’re sending a lot of large images. And you want to think about performance for your users and for their devices.

And if all of those aren’t enough for you, there are some tools that you can use to extend these capabilities and make designing of the browser even easier. One of those tools is called this bug created by Adam Argyle. We’re going to fly over to him to have him explain why it’s so useful for designers right now. Hmm this page, I like the layout – I think, there’s a lot going for it, but it’s lacking some color.

Don’t you think? Well, let’s have fun and and try it out. Let’s make some color in here with this bug. All I have to do is launch it. In fact, I’m going to scoot it down off of here so that it’s not conflicting with the header and I’m going to start with the header. It’s just asking for a nice, bold color, don’t you think? What do you think of, like a purple, ooh, pink, a hot pink, I’m always down with hot pink all right? I’m actually settled that that’s great okay, you can see our guides tool is trying to help us make some alignment checks here, as we as we hover on other elements, you can get distance between them all right, but I’m also interested in changing this image up here And I’m going to drag in a new one.

Will I have an SVG icon here? It looks like this. Oh thanks for that that didn’t work out very well, but if I drop it up here, look at that. I replaced it. That’s kind of nice all right. So what about all of this these cards? I feel like they’re a little tight. I want to check. I want to check out their spacing here. So if I select I’m trying to select the card element in here and I’m having a little bit of a trouble because there’s so many elements in here look, I can actually select the elements inside of here.

That’s crazy town, but in order to get to these grid items, I’m going to select the parent and use keyboard navigation to help me get there. Someone hit Enter, which is going to select the first item as a child, so I selected the grid container. I hit enter and I selected the first one I hit command shift E, which is going to expand my selection. It’s going to find all the other elements to match.

I found them there. I still have the margin tool. So if I hit shift down twice, I’m going to add 20 pixels to the bottom, and that’s going to give me a little bit of spacing between my rows super neat. I can actually continue using this multi selection of I hit enter. I’m going to find that that each of these cards had a rapper element I hit enter again and I’m going to get the imaged container. That’s in the upper part.

If I hit tab I’ll find the next element in the layer tree – and I want to change the alignment of these, so I’m going to grab my flex box a line tool, I’m going to hit left and right and find a nice alignment and I’m going to Pick the center and I’m going to hit enter again and we’ll find that there’s a span inside of that container, and I want to change the text size of this. I grabbed the text tool I’m going to hit up on the the keyboard a few times here.

I’m going to hit command down to change the font weight and, of course it needs some hot pink. So I’m going to go over here to my color picker and grab that hot, pink from up top close out and see what I did and look at that. We brought some color to that page, really pretty quick and we’re able to just sort of express ourselves in a nice fast manner. That was fun. I hope you enjoyed seeing a little bit of taste of what vis bug can do for you super cool.

Thank you. Adam, I really love using dev tools. I use them every day for designing directly in the browser for prototyping for making decisions, and I find that these tools are just getting better and better and better, and that’s really exciting. For me, as somebody who likes to design and build the browser, what are your favorite to have tools? Are there any that we missed in the show, and that we didn’t mention tools that you use every day? I would love to hear your thoughts.

Please leave a comment below and thanks for reading the show we’ll see you next time save I just go.

Online Marketing

Design Systems with Brad Frost – The State of the Web

Post author By Jimmy Dagger
Post date May 12, 2020
No Comments on Design Systems with Brad Frost – The State of the Web

My guest is Brad, frost, web designer and author of atomic design and today we’re talking about Design Systems. Let’s get started so Brett thanks a lot for being here. Thanks for having me, I want to show off by asking you: has the metaphor of a web page exceeded its usefulness, yeah, it certainly has, as what designers we’ve been thinking about.

The web is in terms of pages for a long time right, it’s been with us since the web’s beginning right. We scope things out in terms of pages. If things don’t load in the browser says this web page hasn’t loaded and that’s had a really big impact on sort of how we structure our teams, how we scope our projects and how things are actually executed from from a web design and development standpoint. So, for instance, I work with a lot of large organizations and so they’ll have a team, that’s responsible for the home page and then they’ll have a team, that’s responsible for the product page and another team, that’s responsible for the checkout page and all of those teams Are doing things sort of independent of one another right, because they’re just focused on this notion of pages and as it happens, all of those pages are actually made of the same stuff right.

If we were to break things down, you have buttons, you have form fields. You have blocks and cards and heroes, and all these other things – and we end up with whenever you have these different teams working on different pages and thinking about things. In that way, you end up with you know one button looking similar but different than the next team, that’s working on the next page and so on and so forth, and you, you know, repeat that a number of times and span that out over a number of Years and you end up with a giant mess on your hands, it’s not to suggest that we should stop using the term.

It’s probably still useful for users. Yeah only see things as a flat page, but from a design and development perspective. It’s kind of updated yeah. Yeah, that’s right exactly it’s it’s! It still comes together as a cohesive whole and I think, that’s important, especially as people get into talking about design systems. A lot of people have a big misconception that oh design mean you just sort of isolate things at their component level and just designed the button and just design the sort of headings and just designed the card in isolation.

But that’s just not true. That’s you know. It’s important to sort of realize that yeah things do all of those components, do come together and form a cohesive page at the end of the day and that’s what the user sees and interacts with. So it’s important. It’s not an either-or thing, but we just have to be more considerate about how we make the parts of that page as the web and technology as a whole progresses forward.

How has that changed the way that web designers think about serving pages to users and the ways that the websites are accessed yeah? Well from like an access standpoint or from like a design and build process? The fact that a user could be I mean even these days like accessing the web from their refrigerator. You never know the form factor or anything about the user’s device. You can’t make any assumptions: yeah yeah, that’s right and again it’s gotten really complicated and that’s why I think design systems have become as popular as they’ve been because the devices haven’t slowed down right.

The device proliferation is still happening right. The number of contexts – and you know, screen sizes and form factors and, and you know, yeah native web embedded devices different screens. Different sort of you know. Mouse and keyboard touch inputs, and you know voice and, like all this. Other stuff is just the amount of things that users have or that that designers and developers have to consider as they’re, creating user interfaces and creating these experiences I’ve just sort of accelerated, and we can’t keep up right.

We can’t create bespoke pages, for you know: here’s our small screen view and here’s our tablet view and here’s our desktop view. It’s it’s so we’ve had to sort of pull back out a necessity just because we’re on the hook to deliver more features, more services to more users and more context using more devices in more ways than ever before, and it’s like unfortunate. Our budgets have been increased and our resources haven’t increased with that same sort of exponential curves.

So that’s what’s like sort of forced us to sort of step back and and reconsider how this all gets done, given that there are so many different viewport sizes and everything does that mean that the flat Photoshop file is no longer very useful as a means of Conveying the design, yeah, yeah and and still to this day, I’m working in if Photoshop might be a little long in the tooth when it comes to web design, but same thing happens in sketch in figma.

Just last week I got from the clients designers, you know a mobile version of the comp and a tablet version of a competent desktop version of a comp and and a lot of that’s just sort of wasted effort. Really because all three of those things in isolation are sort of one they’re already alive, because it’s a picture of a website not an actual website, but all those spaces in between is where things really fall down right.

You can sort of paint a picture, especially in a in a static design tool where there’s artboards and you could just sort of move things around in free space like that’s, not how things work in the actual browser right. There’s things like some order considerations and all that you can’t just sort of go on this side screen. I just want to move this from here to here, or this I’m just going to swap this around it’s it’s.

It’s really important to sort of make sure you’re. Considering the actual medium that this user interface is going to come alive and and do that much sooner in your process, I want to ask you about concept reviews before called design Det. What does that mean, and how do you avoid going design bankrupt? There’s no design debt and design bankruptcy. I’ve never actually heard design bankruptcy. Before I like that, I I think a lot of places could declare its design bankruptcy.

I think you know just when it comes to design debt. It’s you have. You know number of teams working on different things and just those we were saying you know working on different pages or different products right across a company and you sort of can can take a cross-section and sort of see a lot of discrepancies. Just in that. But that’s just one moment in time when you stretch out that process over time, especially products that have been around for a long time, the googles of the world or eBay or whatever it becomes like a little sort of Benjamin Button.

Like experience as you click through pages, you get further back in time in these older crustier user interfaces, you’re like how did I end up in 1999 and all of a sudden? So so I think that that’s sort of that sort of that visceral feeling of design debt where it’s like you have all of this sort of old stuff that was created. It’s you know once upon a time and that whenever that was launched, it was the new hotness and the new hotness becomes the old crusty experience.

You know pretty quickly these days right so so I think that the more sort of deliberate and the more sort of systematize you could sort of control and wrangle all of those those sort of user interfaces that are, you know out there in the wild. The better. Your chances are going to be as sort of like reducing that that sort of design debt and that’s again, I think, a big crux like that. The crux of design systems is to sort of help.

You know eliminate that debt to basically take those $ 19.99 designs and say: okay, we’re going to update them with a new design language, but we’re going to do it in a very sort of systematic way so that the next time we do a big redesign. We have actual hooks in there that we could actually sort of lift up the quality of in you know so to evolve that design language like flip the switch and roll that out to a bunch of places, sort of simultaneously or or in very short order.

Instead of like, oh, we have to do this big monolithic redesign, and we have to do that for each of our products again and again and again so the developer experience must be a lot better when you can have like a single source source of truth. For your design, but also the user experience as well, could you describe like what it might be like for a user to be on a site that has designed yet yeah? I mean it.

This happens all the time I mean so. The e-commerce example is a great one, just because I think that you know ecommerce sites, you know super sexy homepage or the super splashy super current right. It’s like it’s got the latest. You know shop fall trends, their shop Christmas like coming up or whatever. That’s like you look very campaign driven. So it’s often like a very modern experience. You sort of like click into like that.

Maybe a product detail page or a product category page that sort of feels modern ish. You know it’s like sort of a little bit more meat and potatoes like e-commerce stuff. So it’s like those templates sort of probably feel pretty good, but then, like you, might get to the shop card or if you like, actually log into your account, it’s like those things feel way different and and then you get to the checkout flow.

And then you know that might be sort of way long in the tooth or it might be sort of built by you know an external vendor or something because they’re processing, credit cards and stuff like that. So it might not actually be integrated with like the rest of the site at all. So what ends up happening for? Why that matters from a user experience standpoint? It’s not just about other things, look different like because who cares as long as that’s effective, then that consistency shouldn’t ever be like the number one goal of any of this, and I think that that’s when we talk about Design Systems, I think that’s another misconception as That, oh, we just want everything to look the same everywhere and that’s just really not true, because if your metrics are doing well and stuff – and you know the buttons look different on the checkout page then on the the product detail page, then that’s fine right! No harm no foul, but the problem is, is whenever you’re, a user and you encounter say a date picker or something – and this is a favorite one of mine just because those are hard to build so often times developers just sort of go and grab something.

You know a library they find on the internet somewhere and if you’re, you know say like at an airline or a hotel chain, and you have four different developers grabbing four different date – pickers across the site. Now, all of a sudden, every time the user needs to pick a date, they have to relearn that new library and that, even if it’s just fractions of a second or a second or two or the, where they’re like oh wait, I’m used to booking from the Homepage, but this is a different convention that slows down that process right and that has a negative hit on you know, certainly when you’re talking about you know booking flights or hotels or something that’s going to cause it dip.

So that’s sort of consistency from a user experience standpoint right that ability of like oh yeah. I’ve encountered this pattern before and I know how this works. So I could just sort of roll on and sort of fill things out a lot faster or interact with this thing faster like that’s. That’s what we’re after right, so that consistency for consistency sake not so much, but consistency from a you know, sort of mapping to what users are used to already like yeah.

That’s, that’s! That’s where it’s at one of the people, problems on a design and development team is not sharing the same vocabulary or calling the same components: yeah consistent yeah. So what are some of the problems of that? And how can designers and developers get on the same wavelength? Yeah, so that’s one of the biggest things that I encounter is as an one exercise that I like to do with design development teams whenever I’m working on design systems with them is right out of the gate, we conduct what I call an interface inventory, so we Basically go across their entire sort of suite of products, or you know, whatever user interfaces could be served by their design system and and sort of divvy things up is like okay, you go hunting for buttons, I’m going to go hunting for sort of.

You know input fields or whatever, and then we sort of do that as a group and then what we do is we get together and sort of present what we found to each other and that’s where it’s really fun, because, especially whenever you have designers in the Room developers in the room, QA engineers, business people in the room right like the product owners, like all these different disciplines and you actually sort of have to articulate what your UI is right.

So so somebody will get up and it’s like. Oh and here’s this admin bar and then somebody gets admin bar. We call that the utility bar right and then the developers are like. Oh, we we just mark that up as the gray bar right, and so it’s like. Okay, there we go right. You got everything out on the table right, these inconsistent names for the same thing, and of course that means you have to have again just like that sort of user experience you have to like slow down.

You have to have have a meeting to figure out what you’re going to call this thing like, and you know a lot – can get lost in translation in between design team or different disciplines, but also different teams in general right. If team one is calling it a certain name and team, two is calling it something else. That’s a big deal right, so so again, so bringing this all back to Design Systems. What that it, what a design system can do is sort of centralize your sort of UI patterns call them names right, give write guidelines around them, so that everyone is like, literally speaking, the same language right.

They know what you mean when you say utility bar, and you know how to use it where it’s useful, but also crucial. One of the other things that we found really valuable in in creating design systems for clients is here’s. What this thing is: here’s where it’s useful, but also maybe here’s some gotchas or here’s where it might not be useful, and maybe you want to use this other thing. Instead, what are some of the trade-offs of investing in a bespoke design system versus taking something off? The shelf, like a bootstrap yeah, that’s a big one and I’d say it’s tough, because tools like bootstrap and material design are already made.

They’re they’re, they’re well tested right, they’re in use by giant companies like this company called. Have you heard of Google before it’s like? It’s pretty big one. It sounds familiar yeah, so so a lot of these people right who are using tools like bootstrap and material design, they’re like oh, this has been tested by these. You know giant companies, so I could just sort of grab this and go and I don’t have to do all that work myself and that might be true and there are sort of instances of that um.

I think one of the big things that is important to sort of recognize and consider whenever you’re reaching for these tools is that it’s like you, don’t own it and it might be attractive from sort of you know, inefficiencies sake at first but as time goes on Right at the end of the day, your boss or your you know your product owners or your clients or whoever they are they’re going to say. Oh, we need to do this this way or we need to add this feature and all of a sudden, you’re you’re.

You have to learn and become sort of fluent in this other sort of system that you didn’t write, so so it can work and you can do things and extend things and customize things that works with the grain and these frameworks, but oftentimes. What I found is I work with clients that end up sort of working against the grain and they end up having to sort of undo a bunch of stuff and write a bunch of other custom stuff.

And then they end up in this sort of like weird messy middle ground, where it’s like. This is our sort of hacky stuff that we’ve done to sort of make things our own. But then also crucially, I’ll say that, from like a more of like a front-end architecture standpoint, I think that it’s sort of like safe, you know you got good bones to build upon, but like material design and boots actually offer a sort of anesthetic right.

They provide anesthetic and that could be helpful because again it’s like oh here’s, some good, looking buttons, here’s some good, looking form fields, here’s some good, looking components that I could use, but if Nike Adidas Puma, if you know Reebok whatever, they were all to use bootstrap For their redesigns, they would look frightening Lee similar right and that’s sort of not what they’re going for so there’s like there is this sort of branding aspect of it right this own ability that sort of gets lost whenever you’re sort of all using the same thing.

What are some of the challenges or unsolved problems of design of design? I mean I, I think, sort of specifically to design systems like a lot of there’s some things that are around sort of you know, tooling, and sort of figuring out how to keep design tools and tools, expanding quiff. You know what’s in code, that’s definitely one of the most. I feel like tangible sort of problems that but there’s a bunch of teams, doing a lot of work to try to solve that and startups and stuff that there are really exciting.

And so a lot of them look promising. And I don’t necessarily think that that’s you know far and away the biggest problem. That’s out there. I think so. Many of the problems with with design systems have to do with the sort of people have to do with communication and collaboration and sort of figuring out like how do we get this stuff adopted into our products right? How do we sort of communicate when things aren’t working as planned like? How do we sort of you know, establish solid processes for releasing new versions of the design system and letting everyone know like here’s one? You want to use the design system or here’s one.

It’s sort of safe to sort of you know, deviate from that system or build upon it or extend it, and how do you roll that back into the system? So a lot of that sort of coordinating a bunch of different people who are all suddenly relying on this, this design system product that stuff, I feel is – is still very tough to crack because it involves people and your you know the health of your your you Know design and development culture and like how well everyone sort of you know, collaborates together and like, of course, that’s that’s tricky right, so you could like you.

Could I could say things like here’s how I would create a governance plan for a design sister for a design system and here’s how I would you know, get these teams to work. You know and communicate more buts and you know easier said than done. Okay, so how much of a design systems success depends on the designers as opposed to the developers? What is their role in the success of it? I think, and – and this might be a little controversial design systems is sort of an unfortunate name because design systems are like.

Oh, this is about design, and it’s really not. The design system is, as I define a design system is, is how the official story of how an organization designs and builds tadaryl products and there’s a lot of ingredients to that story. And yes, like the design language, you know what what the brand colors are, and you know the the rounded corners or not of the buttons and stuff like that sure that that matters.

But that’s actually like a pretty tiny slice of what a design system entails, and so so when it comes to the success of a design system. So much hinges on that design system living in code and living as a thing that engineers and developers can sort of pull down into their application and sort of you know import a component and sort of see that design systems button or whatever show up on their Screen and then they’re able to sort of you know pipe in whatever sort of attributes and click handlers and whatever to sort of make it.

You know, breathe life into it, make it real, but you they sort of get that stuff for free right. If all you have is like a sketch library or some like Zeppelin file or some like like little, it’s a style guide thing where it’s like: here’s, our colors and here’s or whatever, like there’s so much that gets lost yeah if all the developers are doing is Like copying and pasting some hex codes in there, you know sort of crappy like development environments, and it’s just you end up with a bunch of spaghetti, even if they’re all using like the same color blue.

It’s not like systematize right. So what you want to get to is, you want to say like if we change our brand color blue – and this actually just happened on a project of ours – got a brand color blue and actually it wasn’t passing the accessibility level that we wanted, and so they Actually had to sort of you know: tweet the the color blue in order to make that sort of pass. You know because sort of cut the accessibility, mustard and with a design system like you literally, have you know a variables file or is these design tokens? You sort of tweak that value there and then that ripples out to the entire sort of design system right and then that gets packaged up in a new release of the design system in code.

And then you know next time the developers pull that down. Those sort of get and see those updates, so so, coming back to it’s like yeah, like the design language part of it, like the look in the feel of it that matters, I’m not going to say it doesn’t matter, but it’s almost just like you’ll, like do Your thing make it look good like I, you know. I trust you be systematic about it right. Thinking about motifs that are going to sort of like you know, translate well the different components, but, like so much hinges on like getting that stuff into a place where it’s consumable by the actual sort of you know, environments that users will be interacting with your products And that’s what we spend, probably the overwhelming majority of our time and effort on is actually like building out those libraries with components right, an HTML, CSS JavaScript.

You know bundling that stuff up and like sort of working with development teams to make sure that they have what they need in order to use the system successfully. So, to what extent should a design system anticipate the chaos of user-generated content like errors and long names? What is the actual like breaking point of a design system yeah? Well, I think that the breaking point of the design system has everything to do with how well you consider all of that stuff right.

So if, if it’s user-generated content that you need to account for and you’re in your UIs, then you have to you know, consider things like character limits and things like that. But you know there’s many other flavors of that as well. You know internationalization right, right-to-left languages or just you know, German will wrap onto multiple lines, and things like that – and this is where I think again – sort of designing and building components in isolation is a bad idea because you could sort of you surf fall into the Trap of saying like well, here’s this like perfect scenario where you know everything’s filled in and the card has this nice sort of you know image I found from unsplash and it’s like really nice.

Looking and you know, as it happens, the users name is Sarah Smith and Sarah doesn’t even have an H on it, so it just fits so nicely onto one line and of course, the reality of of our user interfaces is anything but that, and this sort of Also comes back to like the trap, was sort of relying on these sort of static design tools to sort of handle that they’re up until very very recently, there weren’t even conventions in place to sort of handle like dynamic data, so that’s sort of how we handle That this is where atomic design as a methodology – I think, really shines.

So what atomic design does is basically helps people consider the whole the pages, the actual product screens in various states and configurations, as well as the sort of parts of that hole right. So the underlying components that build up those screens and at the page level of atomic design, what we’re able to do is articulate here’s. What our homepage looks like with this. You know the fall campaign with the leaves – and you know this tagline and this call to action button that takes people to this and and whatever, but then you’re also able to say, okay and then here’s what this that same page looks like in German or here’s.

What that that same page looks like with you know the Christmas campaign and oh that’s, sort of image that we’re using that has a bunch of Christmas ornaments that actually is sort of you know, impacting the the readability of the text. That’s sitting over that image or something like that right, so you could start seeing where the UI starts falling down and then what you’re able to do is is sort of take that and learn from that and sort of go back to that hero component.

At a more atomic level and sort of say, okay, we’re going to maybe add a variation of the hero component that adds like a little gradient overlay so that the the legibility of the text always sort of you know pops over the the image a bit more. So how we sort of do things like in our own workflow, with that we sort of will create sort of you know, try to represent the whole bell curve. So it’s like what does a card? Look like what does sort of like a kitchen sink card? Look like with like the maximum character count that you might be able to sort of upload as a user or something or what happens if the user uploads the profile picture, what if they don’t right, and so all those various states and sort of you know, mutations Of the other component, so to get that sort of commonly used case down.

Of course, as like a starting point but like you really do have to represent like here’s, the extreme and here’s the empty and sort of everything in between as well and the only real way to test. If that actually works is by sort of plugging in real products and Aereo’s into your user interfaces and by sort of having that best sort of atomic design system wired up where, like the pages, informs and influences the underlying components, you’re able to sort of make changes To those components with which, then, you know, inform and influence that the actual page design, so it’s sort of like a virtuous cycle between like the design system and the pages and screens that that system builds.

Finally, what resources would you recommend for people eager to learn? More about design, Cisco there’s a lot I feel like. I have a hard time, keeping up with them anymore. There’s a there’s a number of really great resources, one that I help maintain is a resource called style guides i/o, which is a collection of, I think, we’re over like 200 50 examples of public design systems and style guides that are out there in the wild as Well, as sort of talks and books and resources and tools around a design system, so that’s just like an open source resource repository that people contribute to and sort of, submit poor requests to.

There is design dot systems which is maintained by Gina Ann who’s done so much work for the design systems community. She has a clarity conference, which is a conference dedicated to design systems. We have a podcast, which is a little bit in hiatus, but where we interview people that work at different organizations who have spun up their design systems and what they’ve learned and sort of you know struggled with as they’ve as they’ve done it.

Stu Robson has a really fantastic design systems newsletter. That’s part of the design, dot systems, sort of universe there and then there’s also a slack group all about design systems as well. So I’d save it like that sort of has me covered for sure and again there’s like a lot of activity there and new stuffs happening every day and people are learning from things you know from each other and plugging them in at their organisations and sharing what They’ve learned and like that’s really for me, the most exciting part of all of this is just sort of you know.

Here’s some concepts here are some things that we’ve found useful share. Those people take them, learn from them validate or invalidate them and sort of share. What they’ve learned and then everyone benefits from it, so your book is also available for free to read online right where it is yeah yeah, so you could read it at atomic design. Brad Frost, calm great breath. This has been great. Thank you so much for pyrite.

Thanks so much for having me, you can check out the links to everything we talked about in the description below thanks for reading, we’ll see you next time.