• 原文地址：A Decision Tree for Designers
  • By Cap Watkins
  • The Nuggets translation Project
  • Permanent link to this article: github.com/xitu/gold-m…
  • Translator: zhmhhu
  • Proofread by: Calpa, Wangalan30

When it comes to pig teammates, you need a system to control everyone

Someone has realized the terrible truth that even though you’ve been designing the same product for years, you’re not doing the same thing. This happens to every design team at some point. Applications, websites, and marketing pages directly reflect not a common set of design styles and components, but the personal tastes of each designer.

Jared has a penchant for big fonts, Karen has a penchant for pastels, and Jordan, for some reason, prefers inserts with an “off” button to the X-shaped ICONS everyone on the team uses.

“We need a design system.” Everyone concluded with a sharp nod.

So the team began its task. You study other style guides, do UI and UX reviews of the product, and spend the next six months building a beautiful, comprehensive design language. You promoted it internally to an enthusiastic engineering and marketing team, and your blog about it got a lot of attention. You did it!

But then…

In a week. You’re sitting in a design review meeting and notice that Jared has pushed the head size up a few points in his model.

“That H1 looks bigger than it does in the style guide,” you volunteer.

“Yeah,” Jared said. “In this case, this type of size doesn’t fit with my content. I need something bigger and stronger.”

Enter the decision tree

Every team that publishes any style guide runs into this problem, and it can come as a shock to people. At BuzzFeed, we encountered these types of discussions almost immediately after we launched Solid. No style guide can be completely adhered to or unchangeable, so it’s important to give your team the opportunity to reasonably discuss when not to use the style guide, when to change the design style, and when to change their design to better match the guide.

The other day, while talking to Allison, one of the designers at BuzzFeed, about whether she should break with the style guide, IT occurred to me how I started thinking about the style guide decision tree — what I call a set of questions you need to ask yourself in order to make the best decision about your product and its consistency. It works for me, and I’ve noticed it popping up a lot lately in the talks I’m having.

Without further ado, this is my decision tree:

Photo: Cap Watkins

One of the important things about a decision tree is that it really motivates designers to be creative by using your design system. It’s amazing what people can do when forced to follow constraints, and I personally think that even just the first two questions have led not only to better design, but also to very interesting application styles that we already have available. I’m always amazed that people find ways to bend the guidelines without breaking them. Design guidelines are thoughtful and purposeful when we have to break them.

Building a strong, practical style guide is the beginning of a long journey, not the end. Having your team focus on the overall system will make your design system more durable in the future.

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