Designing dyslexia-friendly navigational components: accessibility insights and atomic design patterns UX Collective

atomic design

How can everyone within an organization speak in one voice and feel part of a singular entity? How do third parties know which Pantone colors to use and how to correctly use the brand’s logo? Brand identity guidelines provide answers to these fundamental questions in one centralized hub.

The North Face’s “FUTURELIGHT” Apparel Line is Alleged to Infringe Upon Graffiti Artist’s Name and Distinctive “Atom Design” - The National Law Review

The North Face’s “FUTURELIGHT” Apparel Line is Alleged to Infringe Upon Graffiti Artist’s Name and Distinctive “Atom Design”.

Posted: Sun, 14 Feb 2021 08:00:00 GMT [source]

> organisms-factoid

Remember that Atomic Design is only a guide, a methodology and can be adapted to fit different workflows and use-cases. It’s important to keep an open mind and not to be too prescriptive about it. You have officially graduated to the highest aspect of the food chain — templates construct unique pages. Though every page has a template, not all templates are alike, and sometimes, a duplicate template generates an entirely different page experience. It is the consumer-facing part that exhibits your brand and shows off all your hard work.

Lack of context

atomic design

In addition to demonstrating the final interface as your users will see it, pages are essential for testing the effectiveness of the underlying design system. It is at the page stage that we’re able to take a look at how all those patterns hold up when real content is applied to the design system. If the answer is no, then we can loop back and modify our molecules, organisms, and templates to better address our content’s needs. If atoms are the basic building blocks of matter, then the atoms of our interfaces serve as the foundational building blocks that comprise all our user interfaces. These atoms include basic HTML elements like form labels, inputs, buttons, and others that can’t be broken down any further without ceasing to be functional. It’s important to articulate the underlying content structure of UI patterns within the context of a pattern library.

A more stable design for a pulsed optically pumped atomic clock - AIP.ORG

A more stable design for a pulsed optically pumped atomic clock.

Posted: Fri, 24 Apr 2020 07:00:00 GMT [source]

Building atomic design systems with Pattern Lab

Exposing a UI pattern’s code speeds up development time (I love copying and pasting as much as the next coder) and helps team leaders enforce code syntax and style conventions. This becomes especially rewarding when a ton of developers are working on an organization’s codebase. Helps designers and developers uncover bugs along the viewport continuum, I’ve found it to be more helpful as a client and colleague education tool.

/ experience-block

It’s here where we start to see the design coming together and start seeing things like layout in action. A UI’s documentation should contain insights from every discipline involved in creating it, and—this is key—should be baked into the living, breathing design system. Effective pattern libraries carve out a space to define and describe UI components, articulating considerations ranging from accessibility to performance to aesthetics and beyond. In a traditional siloed design process, it’s typical to see lengthy wireframe and spec documents created, debated, and approved. These documents usually take the form of gigantic PDFs, which is unfortunate considering they often contain all sorts of valuable insights, instructions, and documentation about the design system. Sadly, these bulky artifacts are often thrown into a (virtual) trash can by the time the project makes its way into production.

Clean separation between structure and content

A brand and digital accelerator helping ambitious organizations move at the speed of culture. Ions are a repository to manage the variety of properties that any component can have. This type of organisation allows for nesting components into another component.

Creating and maintaining an effective design system means dramatically changing your organization’s culture, processes, and workflows. The rest of the book will detail the entire process of creating and maintaining a successful design system to set your organization up for long-term success. Pattern Lab provides several helpful features for teams to create deliberate, thoughtful design systems. But as I mentioned before, no single tool is going to be perfect for everyone and every situation.

Molecules

I recently visited my health insurance provider’s website to pay my bill. In the course of five clicks, I was hit with four distinct interface designs, some of which looked like they were last touched in 1999. This inconsistent experience put the burden on me, the user, to figure out what went where and how to interpret disparate interface elements.

Burdening a single pattern with too much complexity makes software unwieldy. Therefore, creating simple UI molecules makes testing easier, encourages reusability, and promotes consistency throughout the interface. Atomic design is not a linear process, but rather a mental model to help us think of our user interfaces as both a cohesive whole and a collection of parts at the same time. Each of the five stages plays a key role in the hierarchy of our interface design systems. Because we’re starting with a similar finite set of building blocks, we can apply that same process that happens in the natural world to design and develop our user interfaces.

This means we can break entire interfaces down into fundamental building blocks and work up from there. Atomic design is an interface design methodology consisting of five distinct stages working together to create deliberate design systems. Based on how atoms form molecules and molecules include organisms, you might have guessed that organisms formulate templates. A group of organisms acts like a puzzle, piecing together to create an entire contact page, complete with navigation, submission forms, text boxes, and other layout aspects.

It’s a no-brainer that we need to establish flexible UI patterns if we want to create responsive designs, but creating fluid patterns has additional advantages. The more fluid a UI component is, the more resilient and versatile it becomes. Imagine being able to take a component — let’s say a photo gallery slider — and plunk it anywhere we need it. Sometimes we may need it to be a full-bleed element occupying the entire viewport. The dream is to build our components fluidly and they’ll adapt their styles and functionality to fit whatever containers we put them into. I can almost hear you saying, “I need this whole pattern library thing in my life.” But how do we make pattern libraries happen?

You can test atomic components in isolation without having to look for outside dependencies. Bugs can be fixed at the component level rather than having to debug the entire interface design. The long-term benefits that style guides provide are obvious to those who are already thinking about the long game. The challenge, therefore, becomes convincing those stuck in a short-term, quarter-by-quarter mindset that establishing a thoughtful design system is a smart investment in the future. A style guide provides a home for each discipline to contribute their respective considerations and concerns for patterns.

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