2023-01-30 Meeting notes

[recurring?] Check-in on Paragon Insights Snowflake Dashboard

@Adam Stankiewicz

https://app.snowflake.com/us-east-1/edx/#/paragon-insights-dS34Hf8Kn

What other metrics would you be interested in seeing to quantify and understand usage of Paragon?

[proposal] New KPI: “Hours saved”

@Adam Stankiewicz

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1PoRZBeaSKBYuxL3ok5F7jam9utRNCzYAuas0Fv1EXDE/edit?usp=sharing

Methodology:

1. Assign a “complexity score” for both design & engineering for each component in the design system.

2. Associate a reasonable estimate for number of hours for design & engineering for each scalar value in the “complexity score”.

3. Sum the total design & engineering hours.

4. Multiple the total hours by number of instances of each component throughout the Open edX platform.

5. Sum the resulting hours for each component to result in “Total Hours Saved”.

Discussion:

• [Adam] Thoughts on the methodology and/or the hours for each scalar value? The hours are intended to take into account the following:

  • Design

    • User research

    • Design

    • Design review

    • User testing

  • Engineering

    • Implementation

    • Tests

    • Code review

    • QA

• [Adam] Should this KPI assume teams have to re-design & re-engineer each component from scratch each time?

• [Adam] What about components that have multiple variants?

  • E.g., it might take X hours of time to build the Button component for all its variants, but as a team re-implementing from scratch, they presumably don’t need to build each variant per usage so the “hours saved” might be inflated.

Another ROI resource we could explore:
https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2022/09/formula-roi-design-system/

Paragon roadmap

@Adam Stankiewicz

[discuss] What will it take for us to get a public roadmap in place for both design & engineering by the Open edX conference?

Previous Architectural Roadmap

Goal:

• Create and maintain a public, documented roadmap for the Paragon design system as it relates to Open edX.

Discussion:

• [Adam] Can/should we crowdsource roadmap ideas from the community?

  • Idea:

  • How do we collect ongoing feedback about Paragon’s roadmap?

• [Adam] Are there any roadmapping exercises we can/should do with PWG?

  • Examples in the past:

• [Adam] Where should a public roadmap for Paragon live?

  • Is it easily maintained/updated?

    • Does it require authentication (e.g., Confluence)?

  • [idea] Maybe a new “Roadmap” board view under the PWG project?

Design Tokens… for Design?

@Adam Stankiewicz

[curious] What is the UX’s team appetite for moving to design tokens in Figma?

Tokens Studio

• May enable legit single source-of-truth for design token values across both design & engineering.

  • May allow designers to sync with latest tokens on Github.

  • May allow designers to self-serve edit tokens in Figma and push to Github.

    • Example: may support changing a color and to have that change propagate across the entire platform without really needing to involve an engineer.

Discussion:

• [Gabe] IF we start relying on Tokens Studio (figma plugin), can we confidently assume the plugin will be supported in the long term?

• [question] What might the lift be to migrate from Figma styles to design tokens?

• [question] If we go this direction, how might the design team resource the work to migrate to design tokens?

• [question] Where are the places we can start to have conversation about implementation and initial MVP testing?

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[inform] Stumbled upon a webinar about Coursera Design System

@Adam Stankiewicz