A 5 day sprint with Clear Left exploring library self-service machine software – Leon Paternoster

Workplace topology | Clearleft

The hits keep on comin’ from Clearleft. This time, it’s Danielle with an absolutely brilliant and thoughtful piece on the perils of gaps and overlaps in pattern libraries, design systems and organisations.

This is such a revealing lens to view these things through! Once you’re introduced to it, it’s hard to “un-see” problems in terms of gaps and overlaps in categorisation. And even once the problems are visible, you still need to solve them in the right way:

Recognising the gaps and overlaps is only half the battle. If we apply tools to a people problem, we will only end up moving the problem somewhere else.

Some issues can be solved with better tools or better processes. In most of our workplaces, we tend to reach for tools and processes by default, because they feel easier to implement. But as often as not, it’s not a technology problem. It’s a people problem. And the solution actually involves communication skills, or effective dialogue.

That last part dovetails nicely with Jerlyn’s equally great piece.

Designing design systems | Clearleft

I know I’m biased because I work with Jerlyn, but I think this in-depth piece by her is really something! She suveys the design system landscape and proposes some lo-fi governance ideas based around good old-fashioned dialogue.

Developing a design system takes collaboration between the makers of the design systems and the different users of the system. It’s a continual process that doesn’t have to require a huge investment in new departments or massive restructuring.

It can start small.

Sketching at Clearleft.

An interview with Batesy that gives a nice insight into life at Clearleft.

He’s sketching mad, that one!

You Don’t Need A UI Framework — Smashing Magazine

We noticed a trend: students who pick a UI framework like Bootstrap or Material UI get off the ground quickly and make rapid progress in the first few days. But as time goes on, they get bogged down. The daylight grows between what they need, and what the component library provides. And they wind up spending so much time trying to bend the components into the right shape.

I remember one student spent a whole afternoon trying to modify the masthead from a CSS framework to support their navigation. In the end, they decided to scrap the third-party component, and they built an alternative themselves in 10 minutes.

This tracks with my experience. These kinds of frameworks don’t save time; they defer it.

The one situation where that works well, as Josh also points out, is prototyping.

If the goal is to quickly get something up and running, and you don’t need the UI to be 100% professional, I do think it can be a bit of a time-saver to quickly drop in a bunch of third-party components.

What design sprints are good for — Cennydd Bowles

Cennydd enumerates what design sprints are good for:

• generating momentum,
• highlighting the scope of the design process,
• developing the team, or
• provoking core product issues.

And also what they’re not so good for:

• reliable product design,
• proposing sophisticated user research,
• answering deep product-market fit questions, or
• getting the green light.