Managing a successful product is hard. We are constantly challenged to make the right decisions on what to work on next. More often than not, there are more options than choices. It’s then our job to identify which ones maximize the added value to cost ratio.
My team and I are working on design systems and design tooling at ResearchGate and are regularly swamped by exciting new opportunities. As a consequence of serving a broad variety of people working in different disciplines with individual needs, we receive more feedback, requests, and proposals than we can possibly handle. And on top…
This is a full-time position based in Berlin
The Mission
The web was created by scientists, to foster scientific collaboration and drive progress for a better world. Here at ResearchGate, we’re looking for a committed front-end engineer to join our Design Systems and Tooling team. We are a bunch of passionate optimists from all around the world and many different backgrounds. Together, we focus on taking the web back to its original mission and changing the way scientists communicate for the better.
We love what we do. We connect the world of science and make research open to all.
The Opportunity
Work with impact…
About three years ago we started to build a unified and shared design language at ResearchGate. What started with standardizing basic design tokens like colors, fonts and drop shadows quickly evolved into an ecosystem of libraries, workflows and tools managed and maintained by a dedicated Design System and Operations team.
ResearchGate caters to a monthly audience of over 60 million readers and 15 million registered scientists through numerous different product offerings and countless use cases. Aiming to serve a delightful user experience for this breadth of scenarios in an efficient manner we created Nova, our design system. Among the many…
Recently I stumbled upon feedly’s post here on medium where they share some interesting insights about the process of redesigning their mobile platform following the principles Google’s material Design.
While many of the things shown there are already quite common, on certain thing caught my attention. Arthur Bodolec, Design co-founder at feedly, showed an interaction pattern, I’ve rarely seen before. Like the widely adapted Pull-to-Refresh interaction, Pull-to-Return instantly throws you back to the overview once you overdrag the content to a certain point. …
Mobile Menu
Approach
Recently I’ve worked on a Project with a pretty complex information architecture on two levels.
While the Desktop version had its challenges, the first drafts of the mobile version became pretty messy and hard to use. So I went a step backward and defined some key requirements that should help me to find a better solution
- Access via burger icon and support for drag gestures
- Separate second level but preserve quick access to the first level at any time
- Preserve level status after selecting a second level menu item
- Integrate quick access to the search functionality on both levels
After some wireframes and prototypes I came up with a solution that combined common mobile menu interactions with the list of requirements and some nice transitions and interactions.
You can find a working prototype on my Website
Tryout the Prototype
Three simple ideas on how designers and
developers may collaborate
Nowadays it seems everybody is aware that bringing together Designers and Developers is the key for building successful products. You can read about this on numerous platforms and even I’ve written about the importance of involve Developer’s early in the process. But while everybody agrees on the importance of this topic and the indispensability to implement such a collaborative environment, there seems to be a leak of ideas on how to exactly raise the treasure of this hidden potential.
Simply putting a designer and a developer together into a room probably ain’t gonna work. Here are some ideas on methods…
UI Pattern
Ever since I discovered medium.com the first time, I’m fascinated by the way how they deal with the main navigation while scrolling. I don’t know, if they were the first ones who used this kind of UI pattern, but they were the first ones that brought my attention to this.
This is how it basically works. Scrolling down will move the navigation out of the viewport quite naturally. …
Developers often find themselves at the end of the production chain that already seems to be messed up even before their work has begun. Facing unrealistic deadlines, small budgets or missing specifications can cause frustration and helplessness. Here are a few thoughts that can help to improve your production workflow and meet the expectations of developers
1. Involve Developers early in the process
- Excluding Developers from decisions that are made during the design thinking and making, can lead to concepts that are impossible to build or more likely not thought through. …
Roland Lösslein
I’m a Frontend Software Engineer currently leading Design Systems and Design Tooling at ResearchGate. Follow me: @weaintplastic
