Your design system is not a project.
When new designers and developers join forces to evolve your design system it is tempting to start working in projects. You might even create some epics and sprints to move user stories from your backlog in a Scrum environment. But when your design system is not a full-time effort, this will work counter-productive.
Our agency WebNL was growing when we started a design system team. New designers and developers had joined our teams, and we also acquired another UX agency. With this growth came a need for better organising and standardisation of processes and tools.
Our new coworkers started to work on client projects and they needed a well-functioning design system to do that. Ironically, I found that making our design system into yet another project didn’t function well. …
After shutting down our first design system late 2018 we built a new and improved design system from the ground up.
Back in 2018, when I started my job at WebNL, I was asked to look into ways to improve the bridge between design and development within our company. I came up with a system that automatically extracted design tokens from Sketch designs and translated them into SCSS variables. This was also our first design system.
For numerous reasons this first design system failed. You can read about how it worked and why it failed in my previous article.
In the article you are reading now I will talk about our new design system at WebNL. It is still about improving the bridge between design and development, but without the complexity of automation and the urge to cut down on time. …
Persuasion and influence are all around at Christmas. In fact, we can use Cialdinis principles of influence to find out why the user experience of Christmas is almost always a success.
In the Netherlands, we have a holiday called Saint Nicholas (or Sinterklaas). It’s very much like Christmas nowadays. We like to say that the idea of Santa Claus was stolen from Saint Nicholas, but there has probably been some interchange of different concepts and ideas over the years.
Anyway, the festival in the Netherlands gave me the idea to compare it with Cialdinis principles of influence, because it has so much influence. And since Christmas is very much the same and much wider known, I will compare Cialdinis principles with Christmas and Santa Claus in this article.
Fun fact: You can also use Cialdinis principles of influence to explain other holidays, relationships, career development and all kinds of personal objectives. …
