This week’s lecture concentrated on content strategy, the art of deciding what content a user needs and where in the user journey that content is placed. For me the key learning from this is the fact that content strategy should be in place before you start designing anything. Taking a content first approach, means shaping the design to deliver this content in the appropriate way and at the appropriate time for our user.
We also looked at user personas, a key UX process in humanising our research and turning it into insights that can inform design decisions. A user persona is not a real individual but a representation of a group of users that can be used to inform design decisions and ensure as designers we keep ourselves on the user centric design path.
We also briefly discussed design systems and it is these systems that I am going to look at in more detail.
According to the Nielsen Norman Group a summary of a design system is:
A design system is a set of standards to manage design at scale by reducing redundancy while creating a shared language and visual consistency across different pages and channels.
Source: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/design-systems-101/ (Last Accessed 26/12/23)
They also define a design system as:
*A design system is a complete set of standards intended to manage design at scale ***using reusable components and patterns.
Source: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/design-systems-101/ (Last Accessed 26/12/23)
A design system is really a library of User Interface assets designed by a design team to be used repeatedly across a particular brand’s portfolio (apps, websites etc.). Their real power is in the ability to keep the design consistent across a huge range of screens or webpages. The fact they are reusable also saves time (once the system itself has been designed) as for each new screen/webpage the elements required that are part of the design system can simply be taken from the component library and used. Nearly all major organisations will now use a design system in their work for the reasons mentioned above.
The benefits in time saving by using a design system allow designers to spend more time doing user research or looking at more complex design problems. Removing the need to design for example, a home logo each time a new screen is added to an app makes it so much easier to look at other aspects of the design to make improvements.
There are downsides to design systems, the main one being the time it takes to create the system in the first place. Each component that will be required must be designed, checked and tested before being signed off to become a part of the system. For a major design system this could be thousands of different components requiring careful design and testing before use. There is also the need to provide documentation on how to use the components, as those that design the components may not be the people using them while designing screens or webpages. This means there must be documentation provided on how to use the design system components, which in turn takes time to create. The final thing to remember is that design systems are always evolving, this can be adding new components as a need arises, or improving existing designs based on user feedback or to improve accessibility. This means that along with the component library you will need to have people managing and updating the design system, it is not a one time build it and its done exercise, it must constantly change to meet the needs of users.
In truth, design systems work best when they are implemented at scale for a product with many components that will be used multiple times. For smaller project or one with a large amount of single use components the benefits of scale doesn’t apply, and the time take to create and maintain the design system no longer pays off. The decision of whether to create and implement a design system really depends on the size and scale of the project.
Having looked at design systems as a whole I now wanted to look at an individual design system to get a feel for how they work in practice. I chose to look at the car manufacturer Audi’s UI system as this is different to some of the systems I have looked at before such as Google’s Material Design or Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines.
Audi UI can be viewed at *https://www.audi.com/ci/en/guides/user-interface/introduction.html*
The first thing I noticed about Audi’s design system was how in-depth it is no part of the design is not covered from layout, spacing, subdividing the screen into blocks and designing for smaller screens first each area of the design is covered in detail and clear directions are given.
For example, here is the introductory section about using tiles and cards for content: