Table of Contents
"Design systems define a collection of design patterns, component libraries and good design and engineering practices that ensure consistency in the development of digital products. We've found design systems a useful addition to our toolbox when working across teams and disciplines in product development, because they allow teams to focus on more strategic challenges around the product itself without the need to reinvent the wheel every time they need to add a visual component." |
Summary
A shared, clear Design System will help us have consistency among contributors w.r.t. how things should look. This is especially important given we don’t have dedicated long-term UX resources. We want it to be fast for devs to contribute meaningful work.
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In the Micro Frontend Squad
Exactly 1 year ago Starting July 2019 there was substantial discussion about whether to use a 3rd party Design System (e.g. Bootstrap, Material). we were very concerned that getting attached to a given 3rd party library would cause massive upgrade issues/tech debt we’d have to sort out whenever the 3rd party updated. We forsaw lots of independent groups of developers doing derivative work, making their own micro-frontends, and that it would be very challenging to coordinate shared library upgrades across the platform.. The decision was made that our MFE Squad would build and try-out our own home-built Styleguide 1 (repo here). Over the last year we’ve been trying out the OMRS style guide that we made at that time. Getting code-hitched to a 3rd party that causes us upgrade pain is still a concern (and arguably in tension with a core promise of MFEs: making front-end updates much easier). We are not the only organization with these concerns. Many organizations decide to use their own styleguide 2. But, not having clear design guidance (both for code and UI) is currently slowing us down, and we need to make the best use of the wonderful dev contributors we have available. We now recognize that a third party style guide makes sense, and possibly a full design system.
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