Continuing on from my first post about the first day of CSS day, here’s the second post which covers two more talks.

The CSS day team already put up all the videos from CSS day on YouTube, so you can already watch all of the talks! Amazing.

1.5 Brad Frost – The technical side of Design systems

This afternoon sessions opened with Brad Frost talking about the technical side of design systems.

Brad was talking about how organisations can work on a design system using a pilot project. Organisations can sort of make an inventory of their existing apps and then decide which impending (re)design to use to pilot their first design system.

He made the important statement that a design system is not a Sketch file. A design system is a collaborative tool. He showed his work on Pattern lab which reminded me a lot about what we are doing with Bedrock.

He talked about how it might be interesting to keep the design system in basic HTML because it is technology independent.

I’ve got some extended thoughts on that which I will be talking about in a future blog post. Overall this was a great talk which mostly had me nodding in agreement.

1.8 Jared M. Spool – The UX tipping point

The day ended with Jared Spool talking about the UX maturity of organisations. This was near and dear to my heart as I have been working with different clients and I’ve been figuring out why it’s possible to do good work at one organisation whereas the same techniques do not really apply to another organisation.

I think Mr. Spool has been talking about the Disney story for quite a while and has just been repeating the same talk for quite a few times. But anyway. I guess I am at the right “career stage” now to actually make good sense of what he was talking about and apply it to the work that we do at Mono. I’ve heard from some other people that they didn’t really “get” the talk – and I think it would’ve felt the same a few years ago.

Mr. Spool talked about how UX maturity can grow within an organization. There’s the dark ages where there is no UX at all, followed by what he calls “spot UX”, where someone does something small but it is not structural.

The next phase, phase three, is UX as a service. The organisation figures out they need UX. Everyone can call up the UX team and use them as a some sort of global service.

The next phase is that the teams who need this service figure out that they want a full-time person. So things move over to embedded UX teams. Now, Jared also talked about a fifth level which he calls Infused UX design, and this is when the whole org is at a certain design level and can deliver outstanding results. This is what happened with Disney.

He argued that in big organisations different teams and different parts of the company are at different levels.

More…

More posts about CSS day are coming when I find the time!

(You might have noticed I’ve skipped over some of the talks in my report – this was because I was either not very attentive during the talk or I don’t have a lot of to say about the topic.)