Assignment Background

To keep products consistent in terms of visuals and function, my "Prototyping" class instructor introduced us to Atomic Design and how it translates into creating a design system. Our key lesson was to start at the smallest level (components) and make our way up (layouts) in order to create our design system.

Assignment Task

Our class project was to find a problem in a mobile application and solve it by a redesign. However, a design system was required to be created and maintained through the process.

We were required to create the following at minimum:

• Components (Cards, buttons, navigation, icons, ect.)

• Typography Scale

• Color Palette

For context, I chose Netflix as my focus and used an existing design system but modified per the scope of my project. I had to filter and delete all unnecessary components as part of the maintenance.

What was a difficult part you faced during the assignment?

Categorizing frustrations or errors into the correct category proved to be extremely difficult. For example, abandoning a review causes a "Thanks for Sharing" screen instead of confirming abandonment. I wasn't sure if it violated the heuristic of "visibility of system status" or "help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors".

In our next lecture, we learned this is a common issue throughout careers. Instead, we should focus on clearly communicating how the error violates the heuristic — within a reasonable category.

Feedback and Learnings

The importance of layouts as components

Before this class, I created components but never as a layout. This was a problem because changing spacing on a picture collage required manual changes globally. However, using a component layout made these changes automatically global. I was able to keep my work more consistent and save countless hours.