Abstract 01 — Workflow & Best Practices

Timo Nagel
Sep 6, 2018 · 5 min read

First you should get an account and ask for an invite to our team. Usually that should be setup during the on boarding if thats not the case ask your mentor for assistance.

Login

You should now have the Abstract app installed on your computer and when you log in you should be able to see all sovanta projects.


Starting a new project

1: Create a project:
Lets say you have a new project you would like to start. Just press the new project button in the top right corner. You then will be prompted with a modal window to give the project a name and a description.

2: Import / create Sketch file:
You should now see an empty screen that asks you to create or import a Sketch File. In this case we will import an existing file.

3: Link libraries:
After the import it’s time to link the libraries. In this case the Shape Design System library.

4: Create initial branch:
Now edit the actual work file and create your first branch. You will be automatically ask to create a branch when you try to edit a file from the master branch. For first time user it might be difficult to find a good naming for branches, therefore I listed here some best practices for you:

Best practices

  • <Sprint No.> +<Working Title>
    Sprint 01 — Initial setup for the project

5: Update symbols to new library:
Now use the symbol swapper plugin to change the symbols links to the just added libraries.

6: Save and commit:
Save and commit changes to the branch.

7: Merge to master:
Merge branch back to master.


Working on a project

There are two things you can do with Sketch files, you can either open them untracked or create a new branch. But one can edit the master branch.

Untracked:
The file you open will not be saved back to Abstract — so no changes you make will me available via Abstract. Please only use this feature to quickly demonstrate something that should be saved back to Abstract and is not relevant for the project.

Branches:
When someone wants to make changes he needs to create a new branch. By default Abstract will prompt you to create a new branch when you want to edit or add something.

1: Start a new branch
Create a new branch and start working. Commit as often as you like, the more often the more transparent changes are to others working on the project.

2: Commit changes
Committing means saving the changes you made back to your branch. For more transparency you type in some comments what you have changed. This helps you to later track down changes and gives others the possibility to understand the progress you made and why something might have changed.

3: Review request
After you made your changes and committed everything you can ask someone to review your work. Just go to the branch you have been working on an press the“RequestReview” button, then select a person from your team and send it off to them.

4: Doing a review
This time you got a review request. This should pop up as a notification for you. Now its time for you to review the changes, take a look and the comments or make your own comments.

When you are done with that you have two options how to proceed:

  1. Approve changes

For both options you can send a message back to the creator and advise them to take a look at the comments you made.

Reviewers can not only be designers, sometimes it might also be interesting for developers or PMO’s to review designs before you merge them back to the master branch.

5: Merge to master
Let’s say your review is done and you are ready to merge it back to the master branch. Just click the Merge Branch button, give a short but clear message what you have been working on and merge it.


Developer hand-off

The master branch is always the latest finalized version of the design. It should be the single source of truth for the developers to get the specifications from.

Developers can be invited as guests to the organization or on a project basis. In general every sovanta developer should have access to all sovanta projects, just to make our lives easier and communication more transparent.

1: Invite developers
If the developers are not yet part of the Abstract team you can send them an invite link via the people tab. Or you invite them on a project basis as guest viewers they then can only the project they were invited to.

2: Developer view
For a project overview the developer can just browse the master branch. If you want to give the developers a specific view on things you have some options to do so:

  • you can create a collection with several artboards and share the link to the collection

3: Inspecting designs
When you open one of the artboards, you have 3 tabs at the top of the screen.

Comment
Comment is for making annotations and comments on the artboards. You can mention other contributors or users.

Compare
Let’s your compare the previous version with the current version and makes it easy for you to spot changes on a visual level.

Inspect
Is the inspection mode of abstract where developers can grab all the specs they need.

At the moment there is one drawback for developers — as of now they are not able to download any assets from the inspect view. Abstract is working on that and it will be possible via an future update.


So far for a first overview and introduction to Abstract. We will provide more information and best practices in the coming weeks.


sovanta — Design Lab

Our goal: Outstanding User Experience! We successfully count on Design Driven Development: from design thinking to interviews, scribbles, and mockups through to testing and deployment.

Timo Nagel

Written by

UX Designer @ sovanta AG | https://dribbble.com/Pixelhalunke

sovanta — Design Lab

Our goal: Outstanding User Experience! We successfully count on Design Driven Development: from design thinking to interviews, scribbles, and mockups through to testing and deployment.

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