2019-01-10

Design planning

We've recently added new shard-forwarding functionality to dark-crystal, but that has only been partially designed. We're at a point where we've agree it's important to stop and do some design work (and also clarify how we do design work!)

Past (where we are, and our journey so far):

• large parts of our current setup are just cobbled together (visually and UX wise)
• we had tension in this recent round because:
  • different people did different design, but we didn't have or make time to decide which path we were taking. In the end we jsut built something quite simple.

Future (what I think we should do):

• take what we've built and do (more) in person user-tests (and record them)
  • give people the tool with no context, see what they think
  • see how far they can get with a little context
  • keep your mouth shut as much as possible !
• pause and reflect what was most important / confusing
• make scamps (paper drawings)
  • go and user test these scamps with humans
  • rework and repeat.
• write the code after we've tested designs

The advantage of this approach is that it's faster and less wasteful, and is more empirical than basing our direction on our individual preferences. I've seem this work really well before

cc @kieran @peg @dan hassan