Design Overflow, №1
The five most interesting things shared within the Stack Overflow Design team the week of February 5th, 2017
In-house, distributed, or fully remote: it doesn’t matter. No matter how your team is constructed, you share helpful, insightful, and hilarious things with each other every week. And the Stack Overflow design team is no different. Here are the five most interesting things we shared with each other.
“Change aversion: why users hate what you launched (and what to do about it)” by Aaron Sedley
By sampling a small percentage of users continuously, we can see attitudinal shifts that signal how much pain users are experiencing as they adjust to the changes we’ve launched.
Posted almost 4 years ago, this article by Aaron Sedley is still insightful today. As product designers, we’re always changing things–trying to make things better. Aaron lays a number of practical ways your team can help turn a potentially painful experience for your users into a delightful one.
“Space in Design Systems” by Nathan Curtis
Don’t give up on systematic clarity because of exceptions. Try to solve them. If you can overcome such nuances, even with a bit of CSS trickery, you can persist a simpler concept everyone can stick to.
We’re in the throes of finalizing our type and spacing systems right now for the Stack Overflow Design System. Nathan’s article was a timely one for us. Nathan not only makes strong arguments for a strong spacing system, but then breaks down the various ways to approach creating that system.
“Why don’t email clients use modern rendering engines?” by Ted Goas
But remember: the primary job of an email client is to render emails, not web pages. Mimicking “modern browser engines” needn’t be a requirement and should be considered more like a nice-to-have.
Full disclosure: Ted is a product designer at Stack Overflow. That said, we still felt this was a great article about why email clients and browsers render HTML differently.
“CSS Grid Layout Terminology, Explained” by Ire Aderinokun
CSS Grid Layout introduces a lot of new concepts; there are 17 new properties to learn, and many more new terms to understand. This can make getting started with CSS Grid Layout difficult, as new terms reference other terms and you can get into a spiral of confusion. So, here are the basic concepts and terminology of CSS Grid Layout, explained.
We’re excited about the new CSS Grid properties coming out soon. To help us understand what’s coming, Ire Aderinokun breaks down the new terminology.
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