Exploring Atomic Bomb History Beyond Los Alamos The New York Times
Table Of Content
Making this improvement now means that each page created from that template in the future will offer a better user experience. Sometimes, stakeholders will have a change of heart once they see it in all its glory with all the details. Other times, the page design simply doesn’t offer good performance in user testing. While this can feel like a failure, it’s often an opportunity – to go back and improve. Once we have a molecule, like our previous signup form, what happens? It might be tempting to look at each screen as a single organism, but that would be taking away some of the power in Atomic Design.
In search of an interface design methodology
Style guides should be attractive, inviting, visible, clear, and easy to use. As mentioned above, they should be aware that a whole host of audiences will be viewing them, so should therefore aim to be welcoming and useful for as many people as possible. Even if time and money are allocated to establish style guides, these valuable tools often die on the vine if they’re not given the focus they need to reach their true potential. Style guides can help alleviate what I call special snowflake syndrome, where certain departments in an organization think that they have unique problems and therefore demand unique solutions.
Lacking a clear methodology
Atomic design helps evolve complex design systems, also maximizing reusability and scalability. The name atomic design is inspired by basic concepts in chemistry, specifically the makeup of all matter. Brad Frost’s book Atomic Design acts as a methodical framework, carefully forming design systems to guarantee their robustness and consistency. The nomenclature itself is derived from the fundamentals of chemistry, particularly the complex structure present in all matter. Better yet, even if you were to undertake a major redesign you’ll find that many of the structural interface building blocks will remain the same. You’ll still have forms, buttons, headings, other common interface patterns, so there’s no need to throw the baby out with the bath water.
Viewport tools for flexible patterns
When using individual components (atoms) to create molecules (groups of components), we want to respect the previously mentioned rules of UI design. At the end of the day, UX design offers a lot of room to innovate and create new things – but ultimately, it’s all for nothing if users can’t benefit from the design. Using concepts from chemistry in web design, most design teams find that their lives are made easier. This framework is all about seeing the interface and the components that make it up with brand new eyes, gaining perspective. The process itself often results in a system that lists all the components and patterns, like a design system that holds all materials and deliverables. It’s an exciting way to approach design, nurturing creativity in a way that leaves nothing to chance.
A look under the hood with code view
It’s true that devising an interface design system and creating a custom pattern library initially takes a lot of time, thought, and effort. But once the pattern library is established, subsequent design and development becomes much faster, which tends to make everybody happy. The ability to pull an interface apart into its component pieces makes testing a lot easier. A style guide allows you to view interface patterns in isolation, allowing developers to zero in on what’s causing errors, browser inconsistencies, or performance issues.
An empathetic workflow
Here, placeholder content is replaced with real representative content to give an accurate depiction of what a user will ultimately see. Building up from molecules to organisms encourages creating standalone, portable, reusable components. A client might not be terribly interested in the molecules of a design system, but with organisms we can see the final interface beginning to take shape. Things start getting more interesting and tangible when we start combining atoms together.
Bespoke magnetic field design for a magnetically shielded cold atom interferometer Scientific Reports - Nature.com
Bespoke magnetic field design for a magnetically shielded cold atom interferometer Scientific Reports.
Posted: Wed, 22 Jun 2022 07:00:00 GMT [source]
In the fast-paced world of design, where user experiences shape the success of digital products, having a systematic approach is paramount. When designers and developers are crafting a particular component, we are like the painter at the canvas creating detailed strokes. It’s necessary to zero in on one particular component to ensure it is functional, usable, and beautiful. But it’s also necessary to ensure that component is functional, usable, and beautiful in the context of the final UI. Creating simple components helps UI designers and developers adhere to the single responsibility principle, an age-old computer science precept that encourages a “do one thing and do it well” mentality.
Systematic UI design
But a “product grid” organism might consist of the same molecule (possibly containing a product image, product title and price) repeated over and over again. Like atoms in nature they’re fairly abstract and often not terribly useful on their own. However, they’re good as a reference in the context of a pattern library as you can see all your global styles laid out at a glance. Thanks to the Russian nesting doll include approach described earlier, Pattern Lab can display what patterns make up any given component, and also show where those patterns are employed in the design system.
By the time I got to the payment form, I felt like I couldn’t trust the company to successfully and securely process my payment. The rise of the web and content-managed websites makes it easier than ever for many people within an organization to publish content. This, of course, can be a double-edged sword, as maintaining a consistent writing style for an organization with many voices can be challenging. Writing style guides provide every author some guidelines and guardrails for contributing content.
As it happens, there are many flavors of style guides, including documentation for brand identity, writing, voice and tone, code, design language, and user interface patterns. Atomic Design details all that goes into creating and maintaining robust design systems, allowing you to roll out higher quality, more consistent UIs faster than ever before. These are valid questions, considering we’ve been building user interfaces for a long time now without having an explicit five-stage methodology in place. But atomic design provides us with a few key insights that help us create more effective, deliberate UI design systems.
One of the biggest challenges is that it can be difficult to know when to stop breaking down the design into smaller components. Just as with LEGOs, each individual brick has a specific shape, size, and function, and the designer can choose the right piece for the task. By having a defined set of bricks, or components in this case, it makes it easy to create and test different designs, and makes it easy to make changes to existing designs. And, just like LEGOs, once a structure is built, it can be taken apart and reassembled in a different way, easily adaptable to different uses, situations and contexts. You may have unknowingly always thought of web design in an atomic way. You understand that if a page doesn’t function well, go back to the code, the tiniest parts that make up the whole, to discover the root of the issue.
Many teams I work with are looking for a silver bullet — one tool or concept to rule them all — and I frankly don’t think that’s a good idea. Design systems are made from many ingredients that come together to help the organization tell the story of how they design and build digital things. I hope that atomic design continues to be a helpful mental modal for making components in an interconnected, hierarchical manner. But I hope teams acknowledge and embrace the fact there are many (often overlapping) facets to a design system.
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