Amy Hupe
@Amy_Hupe
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Design systems & content design consultant - available for clients. Prev: @springernature @GDSteam @BT_uk She/her
London
Joined September 2012
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Introduce yourself with the wildest feedback you’ve ever received.
I’ll go first:
“Hi I’m Amy. I’m too ambitious 🤝”
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On formatting content,
@NickColley
just said “that’s why markdown is so good”.
I asked “who is Mark Down?”
I’ll add him to the list of People I’ve Learned Are Not Real People along with:
Jason (JSON)
Jake Weary (jQuery)
Travis (the deployment squirrel)
Anymore for anymore?
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I had to travel for a sad reason recently that I don’t want to get into detail about.
But I booked an
@Airbnb
and received email after email written in upbeat tones telling me to “pack my bags!”, and asking me if I was “all set for my trip?”.
Let’s think about this a sec
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I would love to see Airbnb revise its content to make space for these stress cases - which I imagine are common.
Designing more neutral content won’t hurt anyone who’s travelling for happy reasons, but it will certainly remove a sting for those who aren’t.
#ContentDesign
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@TeaAndCopy
@benaldo
When the waiter asks if you want black pepper, reply with “no thanks, I’m driving.”
Also works with parmesan.
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Hiring managers: how are you working to move away from running interviews up as anxiety-inducing performances and towards a fairer, more inclusive and equal-stakes discussion between you and your candidates?
4 ideas I’ve heard and liked recently 🧵
Please add yours!
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📣 Some news 📣
I’m super excited to announce that
@adambsilver
and I are joining forces on a new venture: Frankly.
We want to help teams create clear, accessible and straightforward digital products that put users at their heart.
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Would anyone be interested in some quick, free, intro to GitHub for designers training?
I’m thinking something that shows designers and content designers understand how to open pull requests and raise issues on open source projects / design systems that use GitHub.
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Top tip for women consultants: add 20% to your day rate to cover the time you’ll spend sourcing evidence to back up the experience-based guidance clients just readily accept from your male counterparts.
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“Being agile” doesn’t mean forcing product teams to knowingly ship shite so you can generate your very own data to prove it’s shite before working in needless increments towards making it less shite.
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If Carlsberg did leaving gifts...
Every word in the Design System - a 3 year body of work - lovingly condensed into a frame.
My team is better than your team ♥️
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Content design hack: you can literally swap “utilise” for “use” every single time, without consequence.
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Design systems are fun because in no other context would a designer go to their company’s leaders and say “we need to take this very well-trodden approach to improve our efficiency” and be told “OK as a TREAT you can have a go, but keep doing your normal job as well”
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If, like me, your mental health is in the worst shape it’s ever been in, here’s some advice a friend gave to me the other day that stuck: “you don’t have to fix or fight this, you just have to exist in it for a bit.”
Today I committed to doing that and it honestly did help. 1/2
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Without exception, all of the people I’ve mentored to “develop skills” have already had the skills they need.
What they actually needed was confidence.
What eroded that confidence, was dogma from industry peers about the “right” way to do things.
Less dogma, please.
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In case the viralence of this tweet moves you to do anything, please consider backing
@section28film
Info here 👇🏻
We are LIVE on
@kickstarter
!
Help us fund the first feature length film on Section 28, a legislation that banned the promotion of homosexuality in the UK, impacting a whole generation of young people
Bring this vital LGBTQ+ history to the big screen
🧵
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Wondering if you need a content designer in your design system team?
Most components don't make sense without words.
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If I’ve learned one thing I’m sure of in the whole of my career, it’s that the most valuable thing you can do in almost any situation is to create shared understanding.
So many inefficiencies in our work stem from wrongfully assuming we’re on the same page.
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There's a pervasive fear amongst some designers and devs of long pages of content.
They're often less of a problem for users than we imagine they will be - but we resort to tabs, accordions or details before we try out the simpler thing of The Big Long Page.
Why is that?
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You know that thing where you’re so run down and burnt out you can’t think a coherent thought, so you take the afternoon off work, and then you spend the whole afternoon trying to do life admin because the guilt of not being productive is just too oppressive and overwhelming?
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Lately I've heard lots of people say they want to blog more about their work but are struggling with:
- ideas
- momentum
- confidence
- writing skills
I'm thinking of setting up a network with regular remote meet ups to help people who'd like support with blogging.
Who's in?
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If you work on design systems and feel exhausted and deflated a lot of the time: it’s not you
As an industry we mis-label design systems as products (or worse, projects) and fund/structure teams accordingly
What they actually are is large-scale organisational change programmes
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Sometimes people book airbnbs to go on holiday. They also might be:
- escaping an abusive relationship
- travelling for a funeral
- visiting a sick loved one
- separating from their partner
- vacating a flooded home
Travel isn’t always leisure.
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Your regular reminder that you can switch “utilise” for “use” in just about every context, and nothing bad will happen to you, and content designers across the land will rejoice.
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I just took some frozen banana out of the freezer to make a smoothie and blended it with protein powder and almond milk and peanut butter. The texture was weird and it did not taste good.
Halfway through the beverage, I realised my frozen banana was actually raw cod.
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I really want someone to give me a compelling reason to hide salaries on job descriptions.
Enough is enough. Save your spiel about your diversity efforts and put your money where your mouth is. If you hide salaries, you are actively preventing equity.
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MY GOD when are we going to stop normalising “fighting for your right to do the job we hired you to do” as part of content designers’ roles?
If you’re hiring content designers, do the work to make sure they can, y’know, design content.
#ContentDesign
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Some personal news: I’m v happy to share I’ll that I’ll be joining BT in a couple of weeks time as design system product owner.
I’ll get to work on what I love, alongside some of my professional heroes, AND I’ll be working with
@iknowdavehouse
again (soz Dave).
🥂 to that.
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Turns out I’m just a sucker for
#DesignSystems
(or a glutton for punishment)
Super excited to announce that, paperwork pending, I’ll be joining team
@babylonhealth
in Jan as Product Manager for their design system. So sad to leave GDS, but I can’t think of a better next step ⭐️
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Oh god.
Has anyone else always thought fintech meant Finnish Tech and wondered why Finland in particular was such a digital hub?
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I've created a self-care plan to look after my mental and physical health during this time. I've made it public, on the off chance it's useful to anyone else.
Happy to answer any questions about the individual items if anyone wants more info. ♥️
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I absolutely cannot cope when people talk about "battle-tested" design.
You're building UI lads not going to war.
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I'm SO excited that the countdown has begun for my new podcast, Systems of Harm.
The 6 epsiode series will explore how design systems can perpetuate or mitigate system harm and exclusion, and what those of us working on them can to do create inclusive experiences.
1/2
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A thought about collaboration.
Collaboration isn’t about tackling everything together, it’s about finding appropriate points to join up.
Sometimes collaboration is recognising the need to move independently and doing so with mutual agreement.
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A quick public service announcement.
I just ran for 30 minutes without stopping for the first time EVER. Not groundbreaking by many people’s standards but considering how unbelievably unfit I’ve been for pretty much my entire adult life, I’m well happy with that🏅
As you were.
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So today I reached a big milestone.
After 15 or so years of agoraphobia, which has stopped me travelling beyond a certain distance, I made it to Portugal.
And I got to give my mum (who lives here) a hug for the first time in 2.5 years.
I’m pretty happy with that one 🥂
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Received a letter from my GP surgery at the weekend prompting to book my smear and reminding me of the importance of regular screening.
Phoned the doctor today and they told me there are no appointments available.
And this is why content and service design must go hand in hand.
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Does anyone else really struggle with creating visuals for a presentation? I’m not a natural visual thinker or communicator at all, and I worry my slides always end up being really bland for those that are.
Has anyone overcome this? And if so, how?
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I’ve never made a birthday cake for a website or a frontend framework before but the GOVUK
#DesignSystem
turns 1 on Saturday and here we are... and yes those are fondant radios and checkboxes.
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Calling all design system and accessibility fans, can you share examples of design systems you think are doing a great job of promoting inclusive, accessible design? And if it’s YOUR design system, even better.
#a11y
#designsystems
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Excited to be starting a new role today as Design Systems Manager at Springer Nature.
I’ve been working with them for 6 months as a content design consultant on their design systems docs strategy.
Now I’ll be helping to build on this work as they start to scale their system. 🎉
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FYI there's basically a finite number of components on the internet and most of them have names by now, so if you're struggling to name one it's probably because you've reinvented something that didn't need reinventing and there's a pretty good chance it's dogshit.
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Announcement klaxon 📣
I'm excited, delighted, and a bit terrified to announce that my half-day training course, Writing design systems documentation, is now ready to book.
You can choose between 2 dates:
- 8 Feb
- 15 Feb
🧵
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When an alt-right extremist Christian American fuckboy sees a conference talk you did and decides to character assassinate you, you really have 2 choices.
1. Let it go and move on with your life
2. Get
@heydonworks
to make it a T-shirt
As you can imagine, I took the high road.
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Where can I find the report on how many men “still” didn’t have kids by their 30th birthday, please?
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Whenever I'm doing leadership stuff, I feel like a fraud if I don't know what we should do.
But when I think of the best leaders I've worked with, they're not the ones who always knew what to do.
They're the ones who made me sure we'd find out.
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When I worked in Government, we had a weekly design systems call to get together with people working on design systems in gov and talk through challenges. (They still do)
I miss that! Would anyone be up for joining if I set up and run a monthly open one?
#DesignSystems
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I’ve written about why we need to change the way we describe bad design patterns - and what to say instead.
Thanks to
@candiwrites
and
@CuriousScutter
for making me aware of this issue in the first place.
⚠️ Content warning: racist language
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I’m brewing a talk idea about design systems being a perfect storm for burnout.
There’s something about the combination of people attracted to this kind of work: conscientious, systems thinkers etc. coupled with the nature of the work: slow, often thankless, full of friction…
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Roses are red,
Gmail uses more than one blue,
Then again, the world is on literal fire,
So who really gives a shit?
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In case you missed it, here’s a simple (I hope) explanation of active vs passive voice, and how it can improve your documentation.
I’d love a RT if you find it useful - my articles aren’t getting a tonne of reach at the mo.
#DesignSystems
#WriteTheDocs
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A cheerful thought for anyone who needs it today.
If you're living in the UK, we have less than one month of the days getting shorter, and then they start to get longer again.
And when they do, we get roughly 15 minutes of extra daylight a week. ☀️
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Introducing the
#DesignSystem
- the most challenging, interesting & worthwhile project I’ve ever worked on.
I’m so proud to have been a part of this & worked with such a fantastic team and so many brilliant individuals across gov
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So I have a little announcement.
After 3 of the very happiest years, I’m going to be leaving GDS and the amazing GOVUK
#DesignSystem
team at the end of the year.
I’m still in the process of deciding and confirming my next move, but now felt like a good time to say it.
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A pattern I’m seeing lately is senior white (often male) leaders Tweeting about a piece of work that their team or organisation has done, with “I won’t name individuals here, as there are too many and I’ll end up missing someone”.
Nope. Try harder.
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Increasingly I just think speed is a really dangerous and unhelpful design system metric.
So often, it's a promise made to organisations who are already going too fast and want to go even quicker.
Good design systems let you reallocate your time to build better experiences.
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How do you create a design system that supports not one but three distinct and well-established brands?
I wrote about how we've approached the challenge at BT:
#DesignSystems
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Design systems are a continuous struggle between standardisation and divergence.
Over-standardisation precludes necessarily contextual adaptation. Too much divergence creates disjointed experiences, inefficiently made.
I’m discovering that the struggle *is* the work.
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People who think that renaming design systems to something else is going to fix deeply-entrenched problems with inter-disciplinary collaboration, poor communication, and fundamental misalignment of understanding of the scope and nature of the work - have you ever worked on one?
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Naming things is hard - and also just completely fuckin unnecessary most of the time.
Seriously babes you don’t need to create a brand for every fragment of your service and every internal project. It just confuses people.
Just describe it and go home.
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I’m usually pretty open about my mental health, but 3 weeks ago I was hit with an anxiety/depression combo so severe I didn’t have the words.
I’m still working to get back on an even keel, but I feel mostly OK and sometimes happy.
If you’re in that now, hang on. It gets better ♥️
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Tech writers and people who work on docs: I need inspiration for a talk I’m writing. What are the most common mistakes you see people making with documentation?
#WriteTheDocs
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TW: Suicide
2 nights ago I was in the worst place I’ve been mentally for years. I didn’t want to be alive anymore and I didn’t plan to act on it but I know it’s a short step from there.
I sent a mayday text to 3 of my closest people and within 20 mins had someone with me.
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I think that signalling when you’re sharing an opinion rather than a fact is so incredibly important. I’m not afraid of my uncertainty - it’s what makes me good at what I do.
Stating things in absolute terms causes such a lot of confusion and imposter syndrome. 2/2
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One of the most common complaints I hear about design systems documentation is that it’s too long.
“No one wants to read your component essay”
“It needs to be shorter or no one’s to read it”
But what if I told you the length itself was not the problem?
🧵 1/7
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Starting a new job remotely is a little daunting, but thanks to the folks at BT and to my ever-present cats, it’s been a pretty good first day. ♥️
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3. Share interview questions in advance. This is a revelation. Why on Earth not?! You’ll get richer, higher-quality information and they’ll be able to focus their precious prep-time. And on that, ANYTHING you can do to cut candidates prep time makes your process more inclusive.
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First week of BT completed.
I like BT.
I like design systems.
A good week.
And now, wine.
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If you’re not watching football and fancy spending your Friday night reading more emo musings from me, I’ve written about my ambivalence about having children.
Probs the most vulnerable thing I’ve ever shared, and I hope it makes someone feel less alone.
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4. Start the interview by pitching (not just describing) the role. Someone did this for me once in an interview and it instantly gave me more confidence because I felt like they were working to gain my interest and respect - it made the whole thing feel much more equal.
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Some news 📣 At the end of Feb, I’m going to be taking a much needed and probably temporary break from design systems.
I’ll be finishing up at BT, which has been awesome, and starting a new project with Mace & Menter for NHS, looking at how people interact with GP surgeries 1/2
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Form field: “What’s your email address?”
Me: “It’s a—“
Inline validation: “WRONG”
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Some more small improvements in my movements today.
Never in my life have I been so happy to see a wrinkle under my eye.
#RamsayHuntSyndrome
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A fairly self-indulgent weeknote explaining why I’ve been a little quiet recently. Read with caution if you have health anxiety.
#RamsayHuntSyndrome
#WeekNotes
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I wrote a post for
#MentalHealthAwarenessWeek
about my recent experience of anxiety and depression.
Solidarity to anyone else going through this - I hope this might help a little ❤️
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Not sure about this whole “designers need to stop designing for user needs and start designing for business outcomes” bollocks.
A) When did we become *convinced* those things were mutually incompatible?
B) Is it *so* bad to have someone advocating for humans over GDP?
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Design systems are ALWAYS the work of many. Hard work, experience and experimentation builds up in layers
If ever you see someone talking about 1 or 2 people building, growing and scaling a design system, and they DON’T acknowledge that, people are getting erased
Remember that
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In case you missed it, I wrote about 4 different ways of structuring docs in a multi-brand design system - and how I recommend finding the right one for your organisation.
#DesignSystems
#ContentDesign
#WriteTheDocs
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This. I genuinely hate tool tips. They’re buggy, fiddly, prone to accessibility issues, and usually a sign of a lack of content design.
And if you really need conditionally revealed content, there are better ways to do it.
Tooltips may keep your UI clean and uncluttered.
But what you gain aesthetically you lose 10x in usability.
So if you care about UX...
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How does one learn to design workshops and training?
Can you self-teach or is it something that you should properly train in?
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When people say "if it doesn't have X, it's not a design system": ignore them.
The term "design system" has become shorthand for a pretty narrow (in the grand scheme of things) application of tools, processes and organisational structure
Why does this matter? 1/5
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Anyone up for a cheeky design systems open space next week?
For those that haven’t been before, it’s a one-hour open discussion on zoom on a design systems topic, hosted and facilitated by me.
#DesignSystems
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Being an ex-GDSer is weird because you bristle when anyone criticises GDS and you bristle when anyone is too complimentary about GDS.
If you ever leave GDS, prepare for a lifetime of bristling.
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Is it still a single sign-on if you have to sign in every single time you reopen your browser window?
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If I have one mission in my career
it’s to do what I can to shift power away from noisy dogmatists and into the hands of the thoughtful and often uncertain people.
From where I’m sat, we desperately need less hot-takes, and more curiosity and humility.
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We've just published a new pattern in the GOVUK Design System, ask users for bank details.
This was contributed by
@adambsilver
@GemmaHutley
@amanda_kerry
from MOJ.
Big thanks to them & to the Design System working group who helped to make it fantastic!
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Do design systems stifle creativity? Kinda.
If the extent of your creativity is dicking about with the border radius of a button, or user-testing tooltips *just one more time* to check if they’re still dogshit (they are) prepare to be stifled.
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I debugged my own website today without any help from anyone so I guess I’m a developer now. It’s much easier than you all said it was - content design is actually way harder.
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If you discover that your form is hard for people to fill in, which of the following do you do?
A) try to improve the form
B) create a PowerPoint explaining how to game the form
Yes this is a subtweet.
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Design system contribution makes complete sense at an aggregate level but is rarely ever part of a product team's deliverables.
It's why design system teams spend so much time trying to garner support, because that support isn't built in at an organisation level. 1/3
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Since launching the GOVUK
#DesignSystem
, we’ve had lots of positive feedback about the guidance.
I wrote about how we document components and patterns, and why we do it the way we do.
Would love to know what y’all think ⭐️
#govdesign
#contentdesign
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