After 3 monthes of thinking, here is a short brain dump.
I start with Design System project some monthes ago, and I will continue to works on. I’m really happy to have @rasmusskjoldan around again to push open design in the projet. And I think we need a better onboarding but also a more safe place to work/experiment for design (UI, UX, …).
Yesterday I spend 2 hours with the team of http://8ratio.ch/en/ and today around an hour with @wrybit to discuss what he did in the past around the Neos UI.
There is tons of ideas/projects around. From my POV the next step should be:
- Kickstart a slim design system website to explain what we have today (high level)
- Create a Design Ticket system (short project description, ideas, …) that designers can take to onboard, …
- Push open design, promote 1 and 2 and try to onboard more designers
- Create a safe place for designer, see bellow
- Iterate on the Design System and refactor the react UI to match the DS
A safe place
With 90% of developers, I can feel the pain that a Designer can have when he spend hours on some experiment and the proposal end up in endless discussion on details and nitpicks. Since now, we have some designer that collaborate with us, but most of them leave quiet fast. We need to improve in this area.
Based on the current Media Module redesign (RFC: Media Module Improvements / Extendability), I took the design from @daniellienert and try to iterate based on comments. I think it’s OK for 80% of the job, but after the 80% we end up in discussion about details (UX mainly), and those discussion can continue for a long time. Without some sort of authority to take a final decision. It’s easy to anyone to say more contrast, this button on the left, more blueish, …
In this area the Design System can help a lots because we have something defined as “our source of truth”, but sometime we need new patterns, and end up in such “loop hole” discussions. What can be the authority here ? I think our user should/must be the authority, and we need to apply some user testing, the outcomes of the test will be the authority, for the first implementation, and then we can test again to improve it.
Building a Testing Framework
TLDR: It’s not about a code framework … sorry 
The team from 8ratio.ch are open to help (external consulting), the idea is to delegate the testing session. After every session, they will help us to build a kind of “Testing Framework”, that can help us or Neos agency to run test, based on commons patterns, with standard reporting, … So slowly we will gain more ability to run tests by our own.
Based on this, I see great opportunity to organize testing session before Sprint or before the Conference, … and try to push our project in a more user centric direction. Tests will help us to understand our users, to gain feedback on side features, …
Next week I create a Doodle for the next monthly UX meeting, and let’s try to make 2018 an innovative year in term of UX, UI and community building.
