A few things came across my desk this week that inspired hope about the future of the web and hypermedia as a medium.
No matter whether you consider yourself technical or not, it has never been easier to be creative with web technologies. Even the pain of setting up a local development environment has been abstracted away by code-in-the browser apps.
Why, then, have we not seen more people using the web as you might expect a layperson use a spreadsheet to assist with a myriad of tasks? The web goes far beyond just letting us organize and process information, it also lets us architect our own little palaces in the ether. It leaves space not just for data and numbers, but for our imaginations and interests.
Cristóbal Sciutto published an essay this past week about using the browser and the filesystem to visualize local media, and why others might want to build their own media environments. He calls these folk interfaces:
I think of these as folk interfaces, akin to the jigs one makes in wood-working. Divorced from grandiose ambitions of building comprehensive systems, it leads the programmer to directly engage with data. I hope this mode can paint the picture of software, not as a teleological instrument careening towards automation and ease, but as a medium for intimacy with the matter of our time (images, audio, video), yielding a sense of agency with what, to most, feels like an indelible substrate.
The spreadsheet might lend us the wonders of automation, but the web has romance. It lets us connect with what Cristóbal calls the “matter of our time” in a way that is much more human.
We’ve put the web in the hands of nearly everyone in society, but we’ve spent a depressingly small amount of time helping folks use the web as a building material.
If we want to empower the average web user to harness the power of the tools at their fingertips, it makes sense that we would start teaching the basic skills needed at a young age.
In the 90’s, a number of teenagers made Geocities sites, which awakened their interest in web development and taught them some basics of HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Many of these teens went on to become web developers. […] Later still, many teenagers learned these skills customizing their Tumblr.
Ah, this had me reminiscing of many late hours spent hacking in the Tumblr theme editor.
There is some interesting discussion in the thread about how approachable mature technologies can even be to the uninitiated:
It’s probably disappointing to see the path so many of us took closing up behind us, but to some extent is a normal process for a maturing profession. There aren’t really accessible DIY paths to auto mechanic, aviator, architect, or lawyer either, though there once were.
I think that this is one of the great challenges we face as the web matures. If we don’t maintain accessible DIY paths as a point of order, we’ll lose the spirit of what has made the texture of the web that we know today.
Building the web is better compared not to auto mechanics and architects, but to painters and artists. You don’t need to make painting your profession to enjoy it as a method of self expression, and the same holds true of the web and any other creative medium.
Art class in middle school should have days focused on CSS.
Finally, an example of something being done to keep this kind of folklore alive for the generations to come. Figma and Google announced a partnership whereby students using Chromebooks will have free access to Figma.
Access is core to Figma’s mission. By partnering with the Chromebook team, we are able to use our web-based roots to deliver collaborative design software to more students and educators inside and outside of the classroom.
This warms my heart in a way that is unusual considering Google is involved.
Figma is a powerful tool that, importantly, is made of the web. There’s quite a lot that a middle school Chase could have imagined up with an infinite, scriptable canvas like Figma.
When it comes to discovering the expressiveness of the web, Figma is a powerful gateway drug.
This week the team behind Stripe’s documentation launched Markdoc, the toolchain used internally to author and manage all of our docs. I’ve had the pleasure of working with this team and Markdoc internally at Stripe for some time, and I wanted to write a bit about why it’s such an exciting tool.
I have quite a bit of experience building content-heavy documentation sites for design systems, most of which have previously used MDX. MDX was a revolution due to the ease of use and familiarity of Markdown married with the power of being able to render arbitrary React components within your document. But in every MDX project I’ve worked on there have eventually been scaling and maintenance issues with closely marrying content/data and code.
Markdoc creates cleaner boundaries between your content and the code that powers and enriches it. If MDX is “docs as code” then Markdoc is “docs as data”. MDX gives authors the full power of JSX, whereas Markdoc requires maintainers to carefully consider the primitives that are exposed to authors, and how they are exposed. Markdoc includes tooling to validate that content has been authored correctly and according to spec, whereas MDX is a free-for-all.
Another benefit of Markdoc is that it doesn’t require abandoning Markdown to achieve customization. While I think some of this has been addressed in MDX v2, consider a case where you want to render a <ul> with a custom class name attached. In MDX, you need to bail out of Markdown and fall back to HTML or JSX:
With Markdoc, you can attach an annotation to Markdown elements while still using Markdown syntax:
# Some fancy list:
- Item 1 {% .fancy %} - Item 2 - Item 3
This is a lot easier to maintain and also retains the value of a Markdown powered authoring environment—Markdown is easy to use, even for non-technical contributors!
There are a lot of other reasons to love Markdoc that I won’t get into here. I am a big fan of the tool (as a user, not just because I work at Stripe) and I’m leveraging it to build the documentation site for Stripe’s design system. Congrats to the Docs team for creating such a robust tool and for making it available to the world as an open source project.
This week I finally received my Playdate from the folks over at Panic, and it’s just as delightful as everyone knew it would be. The Playdate account on Twitter recently tweeted:
That link at the end is not of the hypertext transfer variety—it’s a link to a resource via the Gopher protocol, which is an early predecessor of and not alternative to the web as we know it today. Gopher is used by a very small few today, but that’s not to say it’s not thriving. There are beautiful and rich communities running on Gopher.
If you don’t have a Gopher client handy, here’s a link to the document on the web. It’s a short reflection by Panic co-founder Steven Frank on the Playdate finally shipping after years of work, and I recommend you give it a read.
This stood out to me:
Maybe not every piece of new tech has to be the all-singing, all-dancing conqueror of all tech that came before. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to slow down for a moment and re-explore some of the genuinely good ideas that fell to the wayside as we hurtled headlong into our current future. Maybe hardware whose primary appeal does not hinge on being the absolute cutting edge won’t become landfill quite as quickly. Maybe crushing every competitor needn’t be the goal of every business. Maybe, just maybe, it is good for alternatives to popular ideas to exist.
I immediately thought of the recent swerve in front-end development back towards the platform and web standards. Tools like Remix, Astro, Eleventy and Deno lean not just into the technologies of the web but also the underlying principles. Turns out there are lots of fantastic ideas that we largely forgot about while chasing after the latest and greatest.
To echo Steven, maybe code whose primary appeal does not hinge on being the absolute cutting edge won’t become obsolete quite as quickly. Sustainability is derived from a deep understanding materials, mediums, and their histories.
Playdate doesn’t compete with traditional handheld game consoles in the same way that Gopher no longer competes with the Web—by not playing the game at all. They are projects that understand their medium and are satisfied with exploring their own tiny little corner of it. They know that it’s more important to have 1,000 true fans than millions of unengaged users.
What are some of the genuinely good ideas we let fall to the wayside during our time working on the web that we could re-explore?
I started my career building iOS apps, and made my way back to the web out of excitement for tools that were emerging at the time around component-based design and development. I remember feeling that the idea of encapsulating markup, styles, and behavior was so obvious, and I couldn’t believe at the time that there was no method for that built directly into the platform. If you wanted to build components for the web you needed to setup a complex toolchain and build process, which is very intimidating for beginners.
Me from 10 years ago trying to create a component-based website would have been overjoyed by the simplicity of this. I’m thankful for React et al. for changing the way we think about frontend development, but I’m even more thankful that future web developers will have a far more approachable (and lightweight) entry point to best practices.
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about design systems documentation, and more importantly how we scale knowledge and best practices across a large team. Looking at most system documentation (including for the design systems I’ve built), you’ll see something that heavily resembles the documentation you might find for a standalone product or software library.
We’re used to writing and reading long, linear documents full of content structured from top-to-bottom. But I think that content is actually far more useful in small chunks that are individually addressable.
Design systems can offer products, and some of those may be software libraries, but a design system is not only a product or a library. Good systems are hyperobjects that capture decisions, language, patterns, history, and all of the things that make and have made your organization’s design what it is. They resemble knowledge graphs far more than products, and I’d like to see some of the emerging patterns around software for managing a knowledge graph applied to design systems.
The knowledge graph represents a collection of interlinked descriptions of entities – objects, events or concepts. Knowledge graphs put data in context via linking and semantic metadata and this way provide a framework for data integration, unification, analytics and sharing.
The best way to think about how a knowledge graph can be represented in software form is to look at tools like Roam Research, Obsidian, and to some degree (with their new synced blocks feature) Notion. There are also individuals experimenting with these concepts, such as Andy Matuschak’s personal notes
These tools pull from a long history of ideas that can tie their origins to the creation of hypertext itself. But the original vision of hypertext is not really like the hypertext of today’s web. Pioneers like Ted Nelson imagined a hypertext where links aren’t only one way, and where information can be referenced and embedded across many contexts. (By the way, Devon Zuegel did a wonderful interview with Ted Nelson for Notion.)
A diagram from Ted Nelson's original paper on hypertext, courtesy of the Museum of Media History
Unfortunately, we didn’t get Mr. Nelson’s vision for hypertext with the web. Many of the reasons documentation on the web today is so limited is due to the limitations of the medium itself. Despite that, there are tools and sites popping up that give us a look at some of these ideas implemented on the web.
Knowledge graph systems that make specific ideas addressable unlock some interesting ideas that I think could be applied to documentation (not only, but especially, for design systems).
Transclusion
When content is stored in its minimum viable format and can be referenced uniquely, it becomes possible to “transclude” or embed the content directly in whatever context you’d like.
Imagine all of the pieces of a design system that could individually encoded:
Styles
Tokens
Components
Patterns
Guidelines
Frameworks
Properties
Content
Icons
Illustrations
Wherever these concepts are mentioned in our document, they could instead be transcluded. This means that future updates to that information are propagated through our documentation rather than documents slowly becoming out of sync with one another.
Not to mention that linking these concepts rather than simply re-iterating exposes the structure and relationships in our system to the end user—by seeing how things relate, they get better at navigating the system in the future.
I’ve tried to integrate some of these concepts into design system documentation before, and I’ve seen other systems experiment with it as well. When I was working on the Seeds design system, we built embeddable tags for some of the concepts in our system like design tokens, components, and even specific props on components. When the user hovers over the tokens, they can learn get more information about them inline without switching contexts:
Whenever we updated one of these concepts in our system, we no longer needed to worry whether references throughout our docs would get updated as well. Other design systems have used this same idea. Here is a similar concept from Kiwi’s Orbit design system:
I think the idea could be taken even further, allowing not only simple values to be referenced but entire sections of content to be remixed and re-used throughout the knowledge graph.
Bidirectional links
Bidirectional links build on transclusion by making the original piece of content aware of where it is being referenced throughout the graph.
There are many ways in which bidirectional links would benefit a design system Consider a Button component, which imports and uses an Icon component. This dependency within the system resembles a link in a knowledge graph, and it should be bidirectional as well. If I view the documentation for Button, I want to see that it consumes Icon. And if I view the documentation for Icon, I want to see that it’s consumed by Button (and whatever other components).
Bidirectional links would allow us to visualize the relationship between entities in our system in unique ways. The most obvious example of this is showing the graph as a graph, which is a hallmark feature of Roam and Obsidian.
While this view is impressive, it may not be all that useful. I’d like to see something more like Andy Matuschak’s site applied to a design system:
Here, when you click on a new link it is layered onto the previous one. You can easily visualize the path you took to find a certain concept, and can view all of the related material that led you there side by side. The specific order is encoded in the URL as well, meaning you can uniquely share this path through the information with others.
Fragments
One of the most fascinating things to me as a kid about the periodic table of elements was that the way the table was organized told us about the existence of certain elements before they were ever discovered. We knew there should be something in the table at specific places, and we even knew certain properties of the elements that would eventually live there.
Design systems are similar—there are many concepts within our systems that do not exist, and yet we know that they’re there and that they will exist in the future.
Knowledge graph apps like Roam and Obsidian let you create a new object in your graph by simply naming it and linking to it. This creates what I’m calling a “fragment” here, an object in the system that is essentially undefined beyond its existence.
The creation of red links prevents new pages from being orphaned from the start. Good red links help Wikipedia—they encourage new contributors in useful directions, and remind us that Wikipedia is far from finished.
I believe that fragments and red links in design systems could be an effective tool for encouraging contribution: “Here’s a thing we know we need, it’s been identified but hasn’t been designed/developed yet. Want to help us add it?” Having a list of fragments at the very least gives you a good backlog of content to create for your system.
Queries
While this may be more of a application of knowledge graphs than a direct feature of them, it’s a powerful concept demonstrated by Roam Research’s query feature. In Roam, you can create queries for concepts in the graph using complex logical operators. The results are transcluded into the page where the query is performed.
This concept, if applied to documentation, would allow the user to query the knowledge graph that is our design system. For instance, a designer might want to query icons AND (onboarding OR first use) to see all of the icons in the system used within onboarding and first use experiences.
I’d love to see a future where, instead of browsing a documentation site to learn about a design system, we could ask questions of the system and receive answers and relevant resources immediately.
Shopify’s Polaris design system gets at this idea a bit by exposing a GraphQL API for their design system content including pages, design tokens, components, examples, and more. While their API is targeted towards creating documentation sites, Figma plugins, etc. it would be interesting to see this API exposed directly to users as an interface for the system.
Roam’s white paper gives a good description of the benefits of representing information as a knowledge graph:
Users can connect similar ideas in multiple overlapping hierarchies, remix them without overwriting the original context, and selectively share parts of the graph with others to collaborate on specific sub-questions.
Imagine documentation that allows your designers and developers to connect, remix, and share parts of your design system. Opening up that knowledge graph to contributions is a whole other world of possibilities on top of simply providing great documentation.
Design system docs take the form they do today because that’s what our current tooling is designed to produce. Creating a custom site with the features and authoring experience of something like Roam, Obsidian, or Notion is no small task, and simply using one of those tools directly will mean you’ll miss out on lots of other custom features that make good documentation great.
Still, there are surely ways we can take these ideas and be inspired by them when designing and building design system documentation in the future. If you have any thoughts on that or have seen any relevant examples, please let me know.
The songs of summer begin. Frogs start their singing, and birds chirp in the forests. Worms surface from underground, bamboo shoots begin to sprout.
Summer is slow to arrive here in Chicago, but I’ve received both doses of the vaccine and that feels pretty great. Here are some things I’ve appreciated lately.
A new project from Brie Wolfson called The Koolaid Factory is a series of zines about the ways organizations coordinate, collected in the form of a beautiful website.
While exploring the site I discovered that the illustrations for the project were done by Leila Register, who I then learned also does art for Chicago’s Hopewell Brewing, which is a neighborhood favorite of mine.
Small world.
GT Maru is a new typeface from Grilli Type that’s inspired by the wayfinding signage of Japan. Let’s ignore for a moment that this is a fantastic typeface, which it is, to acknowledge the wonder of the “minisites” that Grilli creates for their typefaces.
Just the concept of a minisite is great. By what measure is this site smaller than others? By the amount of pages within the site? By the narrow purpose that the site serves? What would the web look like if websites were organized by size and shape?
I’m generally a sucker for a good space story, and during the past year I’ve noticed that alternate history fiction has been especially comforting. The Apple TV show For All Mankind is the intersection of these two, and its recent season 2 finale was particularly great television.
The finale managed to weave many divergent plot lines together in a really satisfying way, which I feel many shows struggle with. Vox calls it the best TV episode of 2021 so far, and I feel as though I must agree.
Svelte is a web framework which I don’t often use but like to keep my eye on. They recently shipped a new feature outlined in RFC 13, titled “Passing CSS custom properties to components”. The feature allows you to set CSS custom properties on Svelte components with a dedicated syntax:
<Component --myCustomProperty="tomato"/>
I love this. The syntax so clearly harkens back to CSS by using the double hyphen signifier that it almost feels like a part of HTML itself (something I appreciate in other Svelte idioms as well). This would be immensely useful in regular HTML, and would avoid us from needing to write inline styles in order to set custom property values.
Like many other kids in my generation, I loved Pokémon when I was growing up. That shouldn’t really be a surprise—the entire concept is built around gamifying ecology (albeit, a fictional one). It makes you wonder if we missed an opportunity to take the same approach with our own ecosystem.
ASH is a project from a studio called FINH that wants to do just that by creating a Pokédex-like device that can provide (using AI) information about the world around us, simply by pointing a camera. The video for ASH points out that “we can’t protect what we don’t know.”
ASH seems to only be a concept at this point, but I’m keeping a close eye on it as I’m generally fascinated by technologies that help us build a stronger connection with a physical environment rather than a digital one.
Speaking of projects using technology in wholesome ways, I’d like to briefly mention hyperlink.academy, which is a platform for creating and participating in online courses created by folks from the community. The types of courses offered on Hyperlink are incredible, very online, and range a huge spectrum of topics. Here’s a few running at the moment that stand out:
Speaking of newsletters, one of my favorites of late is an advice column from Heather Havrilesky called Ask Polly. Heather’s writing is captivating and at times heart-wrenching. I really admire how she goes right for the jugular every time.
It’s incredibly easy to create a simple website with a few basic tools, even though the current state of front-end development might have you believe otherwise. That being said, creating something that is uniquely expressive and free form is not so easy without more CSS experience. Enter mmm.page.
The creator, XH, has made a wonderful tool that is completely free-form, while still ensuring that sites work even on mobile devices. You can have the awesome webpage in your head live on the internet in minutes. Highly encourage you to give it a shot.
P.S. the homepage for mmm.page is at build.mmm.page, which is just great. Every time I see it, I read it out loud like it’s a statement—“build 'em page.”
Working on the internet in 2021 is really hard, and it’s getting harder.
The past year has introduced us all to new routines, new ways of working, new forms of anxiety, and new sources of grief all delivered via the web straight to our periphery. On top of that, we’ve also seen the increasing commercialization of online spaces in recent years. Instagram no longer feels like a place for sharing photos with friends, it feels like a venue to monetize your brand and commodify the attention of others.
The times we find ourselves in have only accelerated the degree to which we are turning to the web to find connection, do our jobs, and spend our time. I personally love the web, and have chosen to build my career around it—but even if that wasn’t true I wouldn’t be able to escape this new, frequently virtual reality.
Despite my love for the web, I’ve realized that the time I spend online today is frequently more draining than it is nourishing. Moments that I would prefer to spend creating and learning are instead spent comparing my output and value to someone else. And when I say “spent”, I mean it more literally than you might think—this is what we pay when we pay attention. When we choose to give energy to things that don’t serve our goals we are trading against our own creative well being.
Technology is supposed to exist to serve humans and human goals. But increasingly, so many of the technologies that we rely on have goals that are counter to our own—the primary one being engagement for profit’s sake. Tech companies don’t care whether our engagement is in pursuit of a personal goal, they only care whether they can sell that engagement to advertisers. Our technologies have their own agenda and definition of success that is frequently at odds with our own. So many of us are now beholden to something that was meant to serve us, not the other way around.
I’ve been struggling with how creatives are supposed to thrive in this environment, and how we might separate the web that connects and nourishes us from the web that is trying to profit off of our distractedness. If this truly is an attention economy, how can we engage with the web without paying a toll in the only currency that is truly required for creative work?
And to be clear, I don’t think this is just a problem on the web. So much of our value today is derived from what we produce and share with the world, often done in order to justify some mysterious idea of a “work ethic” in a society where production is seen as a goal unto itself.
But a creative who judges the value of their work by what they produce and share with the world is missing the point. The “why” of our work is in the process, not the result.
I’m writing this because I need a reminder for myself, and maybe you do too, that our creativity is fickle and doesn’t work at the pace of the internet, and that’s okay. The real value is not ultimately in what we create—it’s in the space we carve out for ourselves to be creative, and the things we learn about ourselves and the world within that space. And yes, that includes all the struggles and tensions that come along with the work.
Design systems are a lot like community gardens. Everything in a system has a natural life cycle that begins with a human need, eventually grows into a fully-formed component or pattern, and (if nurtured) evolves over time.
System practitioners spend a lot of time focused on the beginning of this life cycle—how does the content of our system come to exist? How does it find its way into the system, and how can our communities play a key role in that process? We sometimes spend so much time focused on the early parts of this lifecycle that we forget to account for how content grows and evolves within our system.
At any given time, a garden may have plants that are flourishing and plants that are withering or dying. Likewise, a design system may have some content that captures the latest and greatest thinking around your product or brand, and some content that may no longer be accurate.
While it might be uncomfortable to acknowledge that everything in your system is not accurate, out-of-date content is a reality for any design system that supports an actively evolving product or brand. Acknowledging and planning for this is important for both the team managing your design system, and the users of that system. Without understanding the health of our system, the teams responsible for their upkeep can’t accurately prioritize work to maintain them, and our users lack confidence because healthy content is treated and presented the same way as out of date content.
Of course, understanding the health of a garden is a lot easier than understanding of the health of a design system. Plants visibly wither and die, whereas design patterns and guidelines slowly become divorced from the implementation they are intended to support.
Sprout Social’s design system, Seeds, has matured and grown significantly over the past year. In order to ensure we can continue to grow in a responsible way, my team recently set out to paint a clearer picture of the health of our design system for our own purposes, and for the benefit of our users.
Defining health
In order to surface content health in Seeds, we had to first develop a shared definition of what “health” means for content in a design system. This was by far the most challenging aspect of the project, because there are so many factors that can influence health. In fact, this definition will likely be unique to every design system.
In this case, it was helpful for us to work from the outside in by defining the extremes of health in our system. This made things a lot more clear—we know that the positive extreme is simply healthy, up-to-date content, and the negative extreme is removing a piece of content from the system entirely. Of course, there’s a lot of nuance between those two extremes. How do we separate content that doesn’t fall into those buckets, and how much of that nuance do we need to expose to our users? For the answers to those questions, we asked them directly.
We ran a brainstorm with some of our users where we asked them to think about what factors might determine the health of content in our system. Our goal was to determine which “vital signs” our users look for when they are consuming our system. Here are some of the broader themes that we discovered:
Times, dates, and people. Consumers want insight into the history of content in our system—when was it created, when was it last updated, and by whom.
UI kit availability. Lots of designers attributed the health of a component to whether or not it was represented in our Figma UI kit.
Cross-platform availability. While our design system is currently focused on our web products, we do have lots of internal documentation on our mobile products that have not yet made it into the system. Our users think of patterns or components with mobile counterparts as being more healthy.
Usage information. This theme is essentially “how often and where is this component or pattern used in our product(s)?” Frustratingly, this metric is one of the most difficult for our team to measure (as I am sure is true for many system teams).
Known issues and planned enhancements. Our design system team has a clear sense of where the system is lacking, and what work is currently ongoing or planned. Our users, however, wanted more insight into that information.
A screenshot of the results of our brainstorm with the team.
We then took these themes and broke out every discrete piece of relevant information that could be tracked and surfaced, based on the type of content in our system. Unfortunately, we had to filter out any vital signs that were not currently possible for us to track. Most of these were related to when and where in our products a certain component/pattern is used—although this didn’t make it into our v1 solution, we have plans for how we could track and surface this in future iterations.
In the end, we decided on the following vital signs to track for our first iteration:
Publish date
Last modified date
UI kit availability
Mobile counterpart
Known issues
Planned enhancements
In addition to these vital signs, we also decided to rate each page in our system with an overall health status, which I’ll discuss more in a bit. That status is based on these vital signs, and so it was important that we gathered this data before making decisions around status.
As is common when working on a design system, we turned to a spreadsheet for this. We inputted every page of our system, and created columns for each vital sign we needed to track down.
Luckily, tracking down the publish date for all our content was easy—since our system’s content lives in GitHub, we simply had to look at the content’s commit history to see when it was first added.
The last modified date was a bit trickier. Finding the date isn’t a problem (GitHub again), but manually tracking and updating these dates as content changes seemed like too much overhead. We wanted our health tracking system to be as effortless as possible, without adding extra burden for us to maintain over time. Enter the magic of serverless functions…
I was able to write a function (hosted on Netlify) that queries the Github API to retrieve the date of the last commit for a given file path. Now, instead of tracking last modified dates manually for every page in our system, Seeds instead queries for this date automatically. This means it’s always accurate, and our team doesn’t have to think about updating the date whenever we modify content.
For tracking down UI kit and mobile counterparts, we turned to our teammates. We asked the domain experts across our teams to help us gather up links to components in our Figma UI kit and mobile documentation in our internal wiki, as well as system documentation from Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines and Google’s Material Design guidelines for instances where we default to system behavior. During this process, we asked those experts to identify whether missing content was something that needed to be added to our system, or if it was inapplicable to the system. For instance, our Stack component has no counterpart in Figma because it’s a layout utility. However, this being missing does not indicate that Stack is less healthy than other components that do have counterparts in our UI Kit. Context is king when communicating the health of something as nuanced as a design system.
Finally, known issues and planned enhancements were the easiest for us to source because the design systems team knows our system intimately, including its shortcomings and roadmap. Our team sat down to go through every page together and list out the major issues and work we knew was planned or in the works. For our partner content, like writing and brand guidelines, we reached out to those teams directly to have them weigh in.
Collectively, these vital signs painted a clear picture of the health of our system. The spreadsheet alone would have been a useful resource for both our team and our stakeholders, but we knew that a much more powerful solution would be to surface this information contextual, within the system itself.
Communicating health
When planning this project, we discovered that there were two primary user needs we needed to fulfill when surfacing health in our system:
Users need a stop/wait/go signal when evaluating whether or not to use some part of our system.
Users need research assistance. When scrutinizing content in our system, users want rich information to assist in their investigation. Contributors to the system likewise often need a reference point when making updates and evolving content.
Each of these needs are on the opposite end of the interaction spectrum—the former is a quick signal that should immediately communicate the proper status to the user, while the latter is much more involved and requires intent from the user.
Due to these contrasting needs, we decided to break content health down into two parts:
A health label that quickly clues the user into the general health of some piece of content. This status not only indicates health, but also serves as an indicator for users browsing content in Seeds—should they continue reading, or is there reason to stop and investigate?
A ”scorecard” that includes a variety of metadata and information to help users understand health, and to prompt them to contribute to the system directly.
Health labels
Quickly communicating health is surprisingly challenging—there are a huge pool of metaphors and ideas to pull from. For instance, how might we quickly communicate that something is in good health? Here are just some of the words we might use:
Mature
Fresh
Healthy
Strong
Good
Active
Our team spent a lot of time evaluating language to find just the right terms. We avoided words like “mature” that falsely associated age with health—some content in a design system is naturally more evergreen than others, and age doesn’t paint a complete picture of health. We also avoided words like “dead” that are overly harsh and insensitive.
In the end, we landed on the following status labels, which just happen to fit into the plant theme we have going on at Sprout:
Healthy indicates content that is accurate and represents our most up-to-date recommendations.
Withering indicates content that has known issues, but is still generally recommended for use.
Dormant indicates content that is no longer recommended for use, and is in need of foundational updates.
While the “healthy” and “withering” statuses are relatively straightforward, “dormant” may not be as obvious. Initially, our idea was to only have two statuses—healthy and withering. Our rationale was that any page that was beyond withering, and no longer recommended for use, would simply be removed from the system altogether until updated content could be created.
Once we got around to actually assigning statuses to our content, however, this quickly became a problem. Were we really prepared to delete all of the content in our system that had become obsolete? Again, one of our user needs was to assist contributors with research into the contents of our system. Understanding where a pattern came from and how it developed can be crucial to evolving it. If we removed the dormant pages from Seeds altogether, we would be depriving ourselves and our users of opportunities to contribute.
Thus we decided to have a third status for content that is out of date (no longer recommended for new work), but should exist in the system in some capacity. These dormant pages represent concepts that are fundamentally valid, and they serve as a placeholder for future work as well as a historical record for the contributors doing that work.
If dormant pages have some future in the system, what about pages that don’t? In our audit, we did identify content that represented patterns that are abandoned altogether, or that were created for temporary features or campaigns. Since these no longer had a place in our system, we quietly removed them.
Scorecards
While the status label serves the purpose of quickly indicating health to our users, the content scorecard gives them access to the vital signs that informed the team’s decision on whether that content is healthy, withering, or dormant.
Scorecards open up as a modal on the page when the user clicks the status label. The contents of a scorecard depends on what is applicable for the page it represents, but all scorecards show the status label, a description of what that status indicates, the published and last modified dates for that content, and a call to action that serves to drive contribution to the system.
An example of a scorecard for a “withering” page.
For pages representing patterns or components that should have mobile or UI kit counterparts, we display that along with links directly to those resources if they exist. If something is missing, we intentionally display that as an indicator that there is work to be done.
Intentionally showing missing items prompts users to contribute.
For issues and planned enhancements, we decided to allow the content to be free-form (versus the other vital signs that are displayed the same way across every scorecard). This meant that we could craft the content to best serve the context of that page’s specific health issues. This example shows the scorecard for our form documentation, which is dormant, and directs users to alternate documentation that will better serve them:
This flexibility is key, as most pages have very unique problems and considerations that aren’t well suited to a strict template.
We are excited to see how scorecards might evolve in the future as we track more data about the health of our content over time. We also have plans to integrate tools that allow users to submit ideas, feedback, or suggestions directly rather than sending users to Slack.
Making the data work for us
While not the original goal of the project, having collected so much data for our content does unlock some very exciting opportunities for both the design system team and our users that weren’t possible before.
One of the first things that we built after shipping this project was an internal dashboard for the team to see the health of our system from a bird’s eye view. This page lets us see every page in our system, its status, and its publish date at a glance. It also shows us the total counts for healthy, withering, and dormant pages in our system.
A screenshot showing our internal content health dashboard.
This dashboard gives us an effective “snapshot” of our system’s health at any point in time. Our plan is to monitor and record these numbers over time, with the hope that our system’s health trends up, and giving us a concrete success metric to drive towards.
In the future, we have plans to open this dashboard up to our stakeholders as well so that they can easily see where we are in relation to our goals, and to provide our users with a one-stop-shop for finding opportunities to contribute.
There’s lots of other potential when you are tracking this kind of data. Here are a few ideas we’re exploring:
Sending notifications to the design system team when content hits a certain age. We are imagining a sort of early warning system that prompts our team to maintain and prune the garden that is our system.
Since we are now tracking the publish date for every page, we can easily determine if a page is “new” (say, less than 30 days old) and surface an indicator within our system that alerts users to new content they may not have seen yet.
Since we are tracking the elements of our system that are represented in both our Figma UI kit and our mobile documentation, we can easily generate reports for the maintainers of those resources to show them exactly where the gaps are between them and the system.
We are super excited about what this fidelity of data can do for our system, and we hope to track more and more data over time so that our understanding of our system’s health continues to grow along with the system itself.
What’s next
We learned from research that one of the biggest barriers for users who want to contribute to Seeds is understanding what our system needs. Users are much more likely to actualize their contribution if they feel like they are working towards a well-defined result as opposed to self-initiating a system change.
Our ultimate goal with this work (and the work planned to follow it) is to create a sustainable model of growth for our system. Our design system team is small (2 people), and constantly inundated with feature requests, bug reports, and suggestions for changes to our system that we could never reasonably hope to accomplish alone.
We know what we need to crowd source this work if we are going to keep up with our brand, products, and users as they evolve. Doing so will require us to collect, organize, and advertise the necessary changes to potential contributors in order to connect their desire to participate with an attainable and finite goal. Exposing content health is our first step towards this—we hope that by advertising the gaps in our system, we will provide users with organic opportunities to contribute that they didn’t realize existed before.
Simple collections of items laid out in rows and columns is perhaps one of the most common UI patterns. Whether you’re showing a literal grid of items, or building the layout of your site, grids are a fundamental element of design on the web (and you could say the same about print, too).
Given that this pattern is so common, you would expect that a good component library would have a component to encapsulate this behavior. Surprisingly though, I haven’t seen many open source libraries that have flexible but primitive grid layout components. In fact, my team’s component library, Seeds, doesn’t have one either (yet). It turns out this might be the case because getting this pattern right in a way that’s responsive and flexible is not always obvious to everyone.
Maybe that’s because for a while there wasn’t a really clean way to add gaps between CSS flexbox items. This will get better with the gap property for flexbox, but that’s not ready for prime time yet in all browsers (you could progressively enhance, though). You can work around this however, and this tweet from Devon Govett shows how very succinctly:
The basic idea here is that each child item in the grid has spacing around it, which creates the desired gap between items. A negative margin around the parent is applied to cancel out the unwanted spacing around the outer edges of the child items. Voila, you’ve got gaps between items with no errant spacing.
Combined with flex-wrap, your grid will effortlessly wrap into multiple rows, and the child items can be sized explicitly or implicitly. I prefer to use child items that are explicitly sized with percentages, which makes things nice and flexible. If you do this, you’ll want to use padding instead of margin for the child items.
Some form of this technique is what I have landed on for grid components in my personal projects, and it works really well. It’s also responsive as long as the child items are, which is nice.
With this technique, instead of using breakpoints to specify the screen size where your items should stack, you specify the minimum size an element should be before it stacks. I like this because it encourages developers to think about responsive design in terms of behaviors instead of screen sizes.
The code above will flow items into the grid with as many as it can fit on one row while keeping each item above the minimum width. Pretty cool.
It’s important to note that this only really works if you want every item in the grid to be an equal width. I use a lot of grids with variable-width items, so I tend to prefer the flexbox technique. This use case is a great example of where flex still has its places, even though we have CSS grid—flexbox was made for flexible children, and CSS grid was made for well-defined grids.
I want to be clear there—CSS grid can totally handle grids whose children have varying widths, but you need to specify those widths up front, whereas I prefer to use percentage widths and have items flow to the next row automatically. Some are okay with this tradeoff, and have grid components that have you specify the grid-template-columns property for the row. GitHub Primer, for instance. If you want auto-flow rows in CSS Grid (which I do), all the columns have to be the same width.
There is one subtle bug with the implementation of the CSS grid technique above, though. If the minimum width of your items is larger than the viewport width, items will overflow and be clipped. You see this on smaller screen sizes particularly. Lucky for us, the fix is simple, we can simply change the variable that controls our minimum width on small screens using a media query:
This ruins the clean, “0 breakpoints” aesthetic of the original solution, but it is just one breakpoint and the logic is pretty self explanatory. The value you use for that breakpoint totally be a token from your design system, of course.
So which technique should you use when building a grid component? I would ask myself: are the child items of the grid all the same width?
If the answer is yes, I’d recommend going for the CSS grid solution.
If the answer is no, you’re better of going with the flexbox method and having each child define its own width.
Hopefully once the gap property in flexbox is supported by most browsers we can simplify our implementation a bit. I’d definitely recommend wrapping this pattern up into a component so that consumers could upgrade down the road without a breaking change.
I’m also not the only person thinking about this right now. Max Stoiber has been thinking it through recently, and also has some interesting ideas about how to solve this with a reusable component.
Any way you go — it’s so nice how much easier this has gotten over the years with tools like flexbox and CSS grid, and it will only get easier in the future with properties like gap.
Update: I discovered this post by Evan Minto that describes how to use the CSS Grid technique above without using a breakpoint. His technique takes advantage of the min function in CSS, which has good but not universal browser support. Keep this in mind for future implementations.
In a recent project, I needed a way to create unique identifiers that met these criteria:
Human readable (and human friendly)
Short
Random
Creating short and random IDs is pretty easy, but making them human readable is a bit trickier, since you’ll need a list of words to use. I knew that Glitch was doing this well — when you create a new project you get random names like “reminiscent-chickadee” or “cultured-tadpole”. That’s exactly the sort of thing I wanted.
I got to digging, and it turns out that Glitch has opened source their word list on GitHub. The friendly-words repo houses lists of words in four categories that are friendly (the Glitch folks are friendly, and I know they take great care to use friendly language) and available as a package on npm.
Once I had that, it was super simple to wire up a function to return a string generated from these word sets:
