2023-04-12 Paragon Meeting notes

 Date

Apr 12, 2023

 Participants

  • @Gabriel Weinberg

 Goals

  •  

 Discussion topics

Time

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Notes

Time

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Presenter

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Paragon Sandbox

@Adam Stankiewicz

One of the goals of Paragon is to improve collaboration between designers and engineers during product delivery.

Currently, the only way for an engineer to share in-progress UI work with a designer is through screenshots, screen recordings, synchronously sharing screens, hosting the MFE development branch on a sandbox, and/or merging to master in order to link to a stage URL.

We’ve been tracking clicks on a “Visit playground” button acting as a painted door experiment to gauge interest in the potential feature.

The CTA gets clicked by about ~15 users per month from about ~350 monthly active users (roughly 5% of users click it); 60 total clicks in the last 90 days.

We want to take this experiment a step further by actually implementing something usable for the Paragon playground/sandbox via Discovery: Implement lightweight code sandbox that has a unique, shareable URL · Issue #2181 · openedx/paragon.

Examples:

Discussion/brainstorm:

  • What value would you find from having such a tool available to you? What features would be needed to make it useful?

    • Could be a standard way to view and live edit, useful

    • Shareable URL, distinct over what we have in code examples today

    • If a component is changed that wouldnt happen in code, can we test the changes?

    • Not a netlify PR

  • How might you use such a tool to improve collaboration between designers and engineers during product delivery?

    • Useful for designers with a drag and drop or point and click to render components in various viewports to anticipate component behavior

    • Drag and drop proof of concept:

    • Should we extend existing code such as Polaris example, instead of rolling a new one on our own?

    • The live editing code examples means that we could build out a way to persist the data, borrowing playroom logic

    •  

Next steps:

  • Raccoon Gang plans to do some technical discovery about GitHub - seek-oss/playroom: Design with JSX, powered by your own component library.

  • Quick win issue: Update “Show code example” collapsible button

    • Text: “Show editable code example”

    • Add information: “Any component can be added to the code example”

    • Add affordance to collapsible: Add icon and lg-card style of collapsible

  • 2U UX Team input:

    • Multiple screens could be really cool, like a clickable prototype that can be shared

    • If the code can be sued and we can interact with it, that feels strong

    • WYSIWYG

    • Lowers the learning curve for participants

    • How would dummy data work in this scenario? Data heavy components prepopulated with fake data?

    • Engineer could build a page, and pull the designer, and we could work together on that page

    •  









 Action items

@Gabriel Weinberg solicit feedback on playground from designers, drop a line in ux team channel at 2u, and in PWG slack channel

 Decisions