Pulsar — The design system for Jadu
Pulsar is the open-source design system powering the user experience of the Jadu Continuum platform. Sounds fancy, but what does it really mean?
Jadu software is used in large organisations, it powers hundreds of local government/council sites as well as some in central government, higher education and commercial sectors. There are thousands of people who use our software every day to deliver sites and services used by millions.
The Jadu Continuum Platform currently consists of the following main products:
- CMS — Content Management System
- CXM — SAAS based Customer Experience Management
- XForms Professional — Secure Forms
Customers may have one, two or all the Continuum products, and some of their users may access one or more of them as part of their job. It’s important to us that each product maintains a consistent, familiar experience even though their main features may differ. Simply put, you should be able to jump into a different product and know your way around.
Each product has a dedicated team of developers and testers, and each team has a Pulsar team member responsible for designing the user interfaces for new features as well as looking after the design and experience of their team’s product as a whole.
We developed the Pulsar design system to provide a single framework that all products use to deliver consistent, stable and well designed experiences. Jadu engineers have well documented methods to create everything from a single button up to more complex components all coming together to make full user interfaces.
We design in the open as much as possible, publishing screenshots and wireframes on a Trello board with a rough idea of their progress from conception to delivery, we have public documentation and of course, all our code is on GitHub under the MIT license.
All of this is to engage more with our customers as a design team, giving them the opportunity to get involved in the early stages so that we can learn any particular requirements that we may not have thought of.