Content Design / UX Writing

 The Design System Studio (DSS)

Challenge

Skuid’s design system is a full-featured design tool that allows users to style virtually every aspect of their application—without using HTML or CSS.

The down side? There are variables, components, and subcomponents—all with properties. Lots of properties. Properties with names that are a little opaque, so it’s not really obvious what they do. As for reference material, well, heck: that’s a lot of documentation for a user to wade through.

The result was a terrific feature that could be just a smidge intimidating.

Solution

Clearly, this called for a full-on audit! (Oh, yeah. I love me an audit.) I pulled all current documentation off the website, and then stepped through every option in the DSS—yes, every one. I logged challenging user experiences (and made suggestions for improvements); identified items that either didn’t work—or their purpose was unclear, possibly due to inaccurate labeling—and suggested alternatives. Collaborating with the DSS designer and developers, we streamlined awkward UX, re-labeled properties to make them more intuitive, removed items that didn’t provide value, and added a few new ones.

This completed, I reconfigured the DSS’s documentation, culled “redundant” properties that appeared in multiple variables/components/subcomponents, and corralled them into a “standard properties” section. (This update alone reduced the length of the documentation by 75%, allowing builders to recapture valuable scrolling time and use it for something more important, like Slacking funny gifs.)