Atomic Design Pattern: How to structure your React application by Janelle Wong
Table Of Content
By simplifying these complex components, new developers and third parties can more easily interpret technical documentation and familiarize themselves with a system’s architecture. This is more important than ever before, as our work now involves more parties than ever to design and develop experiences at the scale and complexity our users expect. Yet, to design a website with functioning buttons, it is rather helpful to think of the button as an atom. Because once you design that one atom, you can apply it to the entire site in other areas where you need buttons. This way, you can limit the number of one-off components in your repository.
Pattern Lab
The material design style guide defines its overarching design philosophy, goals, and general principles, while also providing specific applications of the material design language. Using a framework means subscribing to someone else’s structure, naming, and style conventions. Of course, it’s important to establish a useful front-end lexicon, but what makes sense for an organization might not be what comes out of a framework’s box. I, for one, would balk at the idea of using Bootstrap’s default component for a featured content area they call a “jumbotron”. How a framework’s naming conventions jive with an existing codebase and workflow should be properly discussed before jumping on board the framework train.
Lack of context
If it is an eCommerce website, there can be products with their images and an “Add to Cart” button, allowing the users to shop with ease. As the field of UI/UX design progresses, new techniques and solutions are being developed. On the one hand, the needs of the target audience must be prioritized and the users should be made an active part of the design process.
Atomic Development
Big thanks to Rachel Andrew, who tackled all the ebook formatting while criss-crossing the globe. She is an absolute force of nature and I have so much respect for her and her work. And also huge thanks to Rachel Arnold Sager, who wrangled all the print formatting, communicating with the printer, and helping make stickers.
Organisms
He began noticing similarities, parallels really, between chemistry and the responsive websites he was building. R/GA’s office was famous for its display of outsider art, courtesy of then-CEO Bob Greenberg’s personal collection. Having a base for all these materials is a great idea, and keeping them adjacent to (or even within) the style guide itself makes a lot of sense as well. Once the design system is off the ground and is being used in real applications, it’s imperative to communicate changes, updates, and an ongoing vision to the entire organization.
It’s ludicrous for anyone to utter the phrase, “This is how we’ve always done things” in an industry that’s only 25 years old. Unfortunately, we humans are creatures of habit, and stepping outside familiarity’s warm embrace is uncomfortable. We must overcome our existing predispositions if we’re going to embrace our ever-shifting industry’s best practices and create successful digital work. It’s very likely the initial exercise didn’t capture every unique UI pattern, so you may need to conduct another interface audit exercise to capture a more complete picture of your UI patterns. This may involve a large group again, but in reality a smaller, cross-disciplinary team will be going through the über-document and establishing next steps for the design system. With the über-document in hand, it’s time to get the entire organization on board with crafting an interface design system.
I didn’t have the luxury of putting my client work on pause in order to dedicate myself to writing, so there were spells where this project took a back seat to more pressing client deadlines. Even posting the entire manuscript online for free didn’t seem to quiet people’s “Is it done yet? I can certainly understand their frustration, but I’ll say it’s not uncommon for projects like this to take 2 years from beginning to end. The only difference is that people aren’t typically privy to all the upfront effort. Because I shared things the way I did, I think it felt a lot longer to people who are used to ordering a book and receiving a finished product shortly afterwards.
UX Booth
Moving away from Ron Popeil-esque, set-it-and-forget-it redesigns requires deliberate changes in organizational structure and workflow. In addition to disorienting users, these monolithic redesigns don’t get to the organizational root of the problem. Without a fundamental change in process, history is bound to repeat itself, and what’s New-And-Shiny™ today becomes Old-And-Crusty™ tomorrow.
The role of comps in a post-PSD era
A design system for responsible publishing » Nieman Journalism Lab - Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard
A design system for responsible publishing » Nieman Journalism Lab.
Posted: Wed, 02 Jan 2019 08:00:00 GMT [source]
Even people who have worked exclusively in the digital world have felt the baggage of industries past. Moreover, the guiding principles, best practices, and tactics of digital design are still very much being codified. Content audits are usually performed in the early stages of a website redesign process to take stock of all a site’s content.
This approach is no easy task, as it requires sophisticated technical architecture, smart people to set it all up, and a relatively centralized organizational culture. How you go about chasing the holy grail – or even if you can achieve it – is dependent on a whole load of factors, including your technical architecture and organizational makeup. A critical part of design system maintenance is ensuring that UI patterns stay up to date, embrace evolving design and development best practices, and continue to address the real needs of the organization. Both outlooks are critical to the success of the design system, which is why it’s so important for makers and users to have a healthy relationship that involves frequent communication and collaboration. With the design system initiative approved, it’s now time to put the right people and processes in place to ensure the system flourishes for your organization.
By creating minimum viable products and shipping often to iteratively improve the experience, organizations are able to better address user feedback and keep up with the ever-shifting web landscape. The taxonomy the team landed on were “Principles”, “Basics”, “Components”, “Templates”, “Features”, and “Applications”. By establishing a taxonomy that made sense for their organization, everyone was able to get on board with atomic design principles and do effective work together. Templates are page-level objects that place components into a layout and articulate the design’s underlying content structure. To build on our previous example, we can take the header organism and apply it to a homepage template.
Maybe the industry has moved away from a pattern for UX or technical reasons. Maybe users reported back with a lot of negative feedback about working with a particular pattern. Perhaps you may want to assume a one-off until a different team encounters a similar use case. If the team working on Application 2 looks at Application 1 and says, “I want that! ” perhaps that’s a good indicator that a one-off pattern should be added to the pattern library. If every whim results in a brand new pattern, the design system will become a bloated and unwieldy Wild West.
The spirit of modularity is weaving its way into every aspect of the web creation process and having profound effects on organizations’ strategy, process, content, design, and development. As we’ll discuss throughout this book, the way things are named very much impacts how they’re perceived and utilized. Thinking of the web as pages has real ramifications on how people interact with web experiences, and influences how we go about creating web interfaces. On the left we see the UI’s content skeleton, which consists of the same person block molecule repeated again and again. On the right we see what happens when we populate each instance of the person block molecule with representative content. Visualizing the content skeleton and the representative final content allows us to create patterns that accurately reflect the content that lives inside them.
Within Pattern Lab, the header was included in every template using Mustache’s include pattern that we discussed in chapter 3. Even though this design artifact was a simple in-progress exploration, we were able to have important conversations about the header’s aesthetics, hierarchy, and suggested functionality. Because the header was presented sans context, we were able to discuss the issues pertaining to the header without stakeholders’ focus wandering to other page elements. Style tiles facilitate conversation to uncover what stakeholders value and what they don’t.
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