#28: Limiting the categories for clarityContinue reading on UX Collective »

How to optimally organize information on the chart?. This is one of the 100 things that every designer needs to know about people.

UX Collective - Medium

Sign upSign inSign upSign inLior SidiFollowTowards Data Science--ListenShareUntil recently AI models were accessible only via solutions made by data scientists or other service providers. Today, AI is being democratized and available for non-AI experts allowing them to develop their own AI-driven solutions.What used to take weeks or months for data science teams to collect data, annotate, fit, and deploy a model, can take a few minutes to build with simple prompts and the latest generative AI model. As AI technology progresses such is the expectation to adopt it and build smarter AI-driven products and we as AI-experts hold the responsibility in supporting it across the organization.We at Wix are no strangers to this transformation, since 2016 (way before ChatGPT — Nov 22) our data science team has been crafting numerous impactful AI-powered features. In recent times, with the advent of the GenAI revolution, an increasing number of roles within Wix have embraced this trend and Together, we’ve successfully rolled out numerous additional features, empowering website creation with chatbots, enriching content creation capabilities, and optimizing how agencies work.In our role as a data science group at Wix, we bear the responsibility for ensuring the quality and widespread acceptance of AI. Recognizing the need to actively contribute to the democratization of AI, we have identified three key roles that we must undertake and spearhead: 1. Ensuring Safety, 2. Enhancing Accessibility, and 3. Improving Accuracy.The art of building AI models is the capability to navigate and generalize to unseen edge cases. It requires a data science practice that comprises business and data understanding that is iteratively evaluated and tuned.Democratization of AI to product teams (product managers, developers, analysts, UX, content writers etc.) can boost the time to ship AI-driven applications but requires collaboration with data science to come up with the right processes and techniques.In the SWOT diagrams below we can see how data science and product teams complement each other’s weaknesses and threats with their strengths and opportunities and eventually ship impactful, reliable, cutting edge AI-products on time.One of the most discussed topics these days is the safety of using AI. When focusing on product-oriented solutions there are a few areas that we have to consider.Data scientists understand the uncertainty of AI models and can offer different solutions to handle such risks and allow safe usage of the tech, For example:AI should be easy to use and available to non-AI experts to integrate into their products. Until recently the way to integrate with models was online/offline models that were developed by a data scientist, they are reliable, use-case-specific models, and their predictions are accessible.But their main drawback is that they are not customizable by a non-AI expert. This is why we came up with a Do-AI-Yourself (D-AI-Y) approach that allows you to build your model and then deploy them as a service on a platform.The goal is to build simple yet valuable models fast with little AI expertise. In case the model requires improvements and research we have a data scientist on board.The D-AI-Y holds the following components:For example, A company builds many Q&A models using Retrieval Augment Generation (RAG), an approach that answers questions by searching for relevant evidence that can answer the question and then augment the evidence into the LLM’s prompt so it could generate a reliable answer based on it.So, Instead of just connecting black boxes and hoping for the best, The data science team can come up with: 1. And educational material and lectures about the RAG topic, for example this lecture I gave about semantic search used to improve RAG. 2. Equip the platform with suitable vector DB and relevant embedder 3. guidelines for building RAG, how to retrieve the evidence and write the generation prompt 4. Guidelines and tools that will support proper evaluation of RAG just like explained in this TDS post and the RAG triad by Trulens .This will allow many roles in the company to build their own RAG based apps models in a reliable, accurate and scalable way.As AI becomes more and more adopted such as the expectation to build more complex, accurate, and advanced solutions. At the end of the day, there is a limit to how much a non-AI expert can improve the models’ performance as it requires a deeper understanding of how the models work.To make models more accurate the data science group is focusing on these types of efforts:After years of waiting, the democratization of AI is happening, let’s embrace it! Product teams’ inherent understanding of the business together with the ease of use of GenAI allows them to build AI-driven features that boost their product capabilities.Because non-AI experts are not equipped with a deep understanding of how AI models work and how to evaluate them properly at scale they might face issues around results’ reliability and accuracy. This is where the data science group can assist and support their efforts by guiding the teams on how to safely use the models, create mitigation services if needed, share the latest best practices around new AI capabilities, evaluate their performance, and serve them at scale.When an AI feature shows great business impact, the product teams will immediately start shifting their effort towards improving the results, this is where data scientists can offer advanced approaches to improve performance as they understand how these models work. To conclude, The role of data science in democratizing AI is a crucial one, as it bridges the gap between AI technology and those who may not have extensive AI expertise. Through collaboration between data scientists and product teams, we can harness the strengths of both fields to create safe, accessible, and accurate AI-driven solutions that drive innovation and deliver exceptional user experiences. With ongoing advancements and innovations, the future of democratized AI holds great potential for transformative change across industries.*Unless otherwise noted, all images are by the author----Towards Data ScienceAI at WixHelpStatusAboutCareersBlogPrivacyTermsText to speechTeams

The Role of Data Science in Democratizing AI. As AI technology progresses such is the expectation to adopt it and build smarter AI-driven products and we as AI-experts hold the responsibility in supporting it across the organization

Towards Data Science - Medium

The Role of Data Science in Democratizing AI

Sign upSign inSign upSign inMatej LatinFollowUX Collective--1ListenShareHere’s the harsh truth: I’ve reviewed more than 1,000 portfolios in my design career so far, and I turned 90% of them down because of one thing — the linear design process.By “linear design process” I mean cookie-cutter case studies that always read the same. The designer learned about a problem, conducted user interviews, created user personas, proceeded to sketches, then mockups and wireframes, made everything beautiful through visual design, created a prototype, and tested it with five users. Everything was perfect so they also created a design system which is not a design system but a style guide. But they call it a “design system” because it’s trendy and a keyword for the recruiters.It’s like finding a product that you want to buy online and it only has 5-star reviews. When everything is shown as perfect it loses credibility — are the reviews fake? It’s the same when I review your cookie-cutter portfolio — when everything’s perfect I wonder whether it’s all fake.The 90% is my estimation based on the many portfolios I reviewed, I don’t know what the exact number is, but it’s high. Most UX and product design portfolios have two case studies that are the same, it’s just the details that differ slightly.I posted a much shorter version of this post on LinkedIn a couple of months ago and it went viral. Many experienced designers agreed:Many case studies read to me like school homework: they knew what the answer and the process were “supposed to be” according to the textbook, so made up the story to fit. In reality, as you point out, it’s never smooth and linear. It’s messy and loopish. If you’re doing a good job, you rarely end up with anything remotely like you anticipated when you started out. (Source)A design manager shared their perspective:If I see another case study that walks me through personas, walls of sticky notes, photos of customers being interviewed, and sketches from a notebook… I’m going to lose my freaking mind and pull out my hair. (Source)When I review such portfolios I can’t help but think that the designer behind them is either inexperienced, lacks a passion for design, or simply can’t communicate the value of their work. Sometimes, all of the above are true but even if only one is, it’s enough to be turned down by design-mature companies. This brings me to the second point.A shallow portfolio with cookie-cutter case studies may get you a job in UX. But it’ll most likely be a job with a design-immature company that doesn’t fully understand design. You get stuck doing boring design work and your career stalls because the quality of your work never increases so you don’t have anything better to put in your portfolio. You get trapped in a loop.When I say 90% of designers are unhirable, what I mean is they’ll be turned down immediately by design-mature companies.Design mature companies, on the other hand, look for designers who can solve problems in creative ways. Taking the design process that you learned in the UX boot camp and using it to solve every problem you face just won’t cut it for them. When I say 90% of designers are unhirable, what I mean is they’ll be turned down immediately by this type of company.essays.uxdesign.ccWe teach designers the design process and how their case studies should be structured, but that’s not how design works in practice where it’s a messy, non-linear process. Following this conclusion, there are two major problems when it comes to designers’ processes and how they present their work:Let’s take a closer look at both of them.My assumption, based on interviewing and speaking to designers, is that a relatively small amount of these are truly linear. The rest of them are embellished to seem perfect because designers think that that’s what hiring managers want to see. Or they simply think that’s how case studies should be — a perfect, linear story with a happy ending.This probably aligns with seniority (or lack of experience), I estimate that 20–30% of designers really use a linear design process. (That’s how many identified as junior or intermediate in my research for Why Designers Quit 2023). I have witnessed such designers. You tell them that an interaction in a UI needs to be redesigned. It’s a small task but they’ll start talking about conducting user interviews and creating personas.The design process doesn’t have a beginning or an end. It can start at either of the steps of a design process (so numbering them is misleading, top example in attached image), and it never really ends (so it needs to be a cycle, bottom example). This also means that you don’t have to go back to the beginning of “the process” every time you get asked to do something.A truly linear design process would mean that designers are in full control. Eduardo Hernandez explains this beautifully in Death to the Double Diamond.The more control you have over influencing factors, the more predictable the problem-solving process can be. The less control you have over influencing factors, the less predictable the problem-solving process can be.So even the double diamond design process which has been often cited as the design process doesn’t reflect reality. It’s the perfect ideal that designers strive for but rarely achieve. Designers simply don’t have that much control over the influencing factors so a design manager reading through a perfect, cookie-cutter case study, even if it uses the double diamond process, knows immediately that it’s fake.Doing the double diamond lacks purpose, continuity and context because the designer isn’t reacting to the unexpected and emerging questions or situations they find themselves in rather the double diamond offers answers to questions designers often don’t have, Hernandez elaborates.So what should you as a less experienced designer do? You were taught to use a process but now I’m telling you to scrap it. Here are my recommendations:When I posted that viral post on LinkedIn, one of the things that surprised me most was comments from designers saying “It’s true that the design process is messy and chaotic, but shouldn’t the case studies be linear?” Here’s an example:However, when you’re creating a case study, you need to present a linear sequence of slides, following a logical narrative. If you’re trying to tell a story, it must be done logically. I recently completed a UX case study, and the process was quite chaotic. I had to conduct UX research twice, write user stories, and keep making revisions. However, in the case study, I had to present it in a linear fashion. (Source)Another comment sheds more light on this type of thinking:There’s probably tons of roadblocks, iterations, and back-and-forth that they didn’t put there because frankly, linear stories are easier to create and consume, especially when you’re making things for recruiters/managers to just skim through. (Source)Who says that case studies need to be linear and exclude all the messy details? The details are the ones that are interesting and how design managers will rate your design process. Almost anyone can learn the basics of a cookie-cutter design process and complete the steps. Great designers are leaders of design in their teams, they’re great collaborators, and they know how to adapt and use the right tools to communicate what’s needed to find the right solution. Unlike cookie-cutter designers who always do the same thing and avoid risk and uncertainty, they aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty. This is what design managers want to see and this is what you should put in your portfolio.I’ve been mentoring Monica for the past few weeks as part of my UX Buddy mentorship programme. She wrote a couple of case studies and asked me to review them. I spotted this problem immediately. In the case study, she was presented with a problem and eventually came up with two possible solutions.One was a minor change to the existing UI, the other one was completely different. She proceeded with the minor change and failed to explain why in the case study. Later on, she wrote that the solution didn’t work as planned and it introduced new problems. They went with the other solution and that one worked. That’s it! That’s not enough context!She never explained that she lacked the confidence to push for the other solution which she thought was better. She excluded the details of why they picked the solution they did, how when it failed she gathered her courage, took matters into her own hands and pushed for the other one. Instead of trying to minimise the change to the UI, she added intentional friction to the experience in a beneficial way. This friction helped explain the new UI to the users and the user testing proved that it worked much better.She failed to explain all that in her case study. She had simplified it to the point it read as a linear story of going from one potential solution to another until something worked. She failed to tell the interesting story of how she faced one of her weaknesses and became a much stronger designer because of it.I believe that the majority of designers, 70–80% of them simplify their case studies to fit this linear structure. These are the things that convince designers that this is the right way:So the majority of designers are led to believe that they need to reverse-engineer their messy work into linear, simplified depictions. You don’t! Stories may be linear, but the hero of the story faces various challenges and needs to adapt to defeat the monster. Slava Shestopalov explains in 10 Tips to Organize your Design Portfolio that design isn’t linear so neither should your case studies:As you might’ve noticed, I don’t speak about the “ideal” design process for a simple reason: it doesn’t exist. Design is never linear, and all projects are unique. The point is to show and explain your path from the kick-off to the final result in the portfolio.This is where we get to the fix I promise in the subtitle. If a cookie-cutter case study was a story about a knight and a dragon, this is what it would read like:I learned about the dragon terrorising a village and how they were willing to pay great amounts of gold to the knight that slays him. I asked the villagers where the cave was and how to kill it. I found the dragon’s cave, created a plan with pebbles in the sand, and sought out the dragon. It spit fire into me, but I deflected it with my shield, I then thrust my sword into the dragon and it died. I collected the gold, happy days.Replace the knight with the designer, villagers with users, pebbles with post-it notes, the dragon with the design problem, the shield with the design process, and the sword with Figma and you have a typical cookie-cutter UX case study. But no dragon can be slayed with only a simple thrust of a sword, just like no design problem can be solved only with a beautiful prototype in Figma.Why does your case study need to read like a story? The cookie-cutter knight and dragon story above is boring. Not because it has a happy ending, but because the knight doesn’t face any real challenge, he doesn’t need to adapt or learn anything to slay the dragon. He’s almighty and whatever he does turns out perfectly well. It’s hardly a story.In reality, the knight slaying a dragon would have to face horrible dangers. He’d probably have to drop the shield as it would get too hot to carry as soon as the dragon spit fire in it (abandon the idealistic design process). He would never get close enough to thrust the sword into the dragon on his first try (no point in creating a beautiful visual design in Figma too soon). He’d have to retreat, face self-doubt, gather his courage, learn, adapt, come up with a new plan, try again, and repeat until something worked. These are the details that make the knight interesting and human. You can relate to him.It’s the same with the design manager when they review your portfolio. If you tell a story, include the details and the things that didn’t work and how you adapted to overcome the problem, the design manager will empathise with you. For the five minutes it takes to read your case study, they’ll be in your shoes. It’ll remind them of all the times when they had similar problems and it’ll make them appreciate you and your struggles as a designer.Stories have the ability to help us learn about others and to find understanding and empathy for them and their situations.— Kate HurstStorytelling is also one of the key soft skills looked for in designers (Source). The logic is the following. Kate Hurst explains in The Importance of Storytelling and Story Creation that storytelling helps us learn about others and to find understanding and empathy for them and their situations. This means that if you can tell a good story about your design work, you’ll also be able to use your storytelling skills to communicate the value of design once I hire you.The argument that the stories are linear is partly true — they almost always follow the same structure, also called the story arc. It has five main ingredients: exposition, inciting incident, action, climax, and conclusion. That doesn’t mean that the hero in the story is almighty and they don’t face any challenges.It means that you can use a structure to write your case studies but still include all the messy details. The structure that I recommend is the STAR framework, or Situation, Task, Action, and Result. It aligns well with the design process and the story arc. You can and should describe all the messy details in the Action part (Fig 2).Here are a few tips on how to use the STAR framework and how to better present your work realistically, without embellishing everything to the point where it all looks perfect.First of all, add enough context so that anyone can understand what you’re talking about (we don’t have your insider’s point of view). Tell the story as if you’re telling it to your friend, not your coworker (who already knows most of the details).Use the STAR framework:You can download a printable version of this framework, complete with an example that explains how to tell a good story in your UX case study (Fig 3).Download it here →Is the UX hiring the problem? Recruiters looking at portfolios and checking off the “required” parts? Partly yes, there’s only a fraction of them who are specialised in recruiting designers. So of course those who aren’t will have a checklist for candidates to check against. But on the other hand, designers can write a case study that will satisfy both recruiters and design managers. Adding details and explaining how you had to go a few steps back in the process because you learned something doesn’t mean you have to completely abandon a typical structure of a case study.Here’s my most important advice, the one where most designers fail. When it comes to case studies and your portfolio, make an effort. Don’t just use a template, put some images in, replace the placeholder text with your own and think that that’s it. Your portfolio is also a reflection of how you design. If I see a poorly designed portfolio and badly written, cookie-cutter case studies, I’ll see that as a reflection of your design skills.But most of all, junior designers need to learn about the flexibility and the messiness of design work and experienced designers must stop hiding the messy details of their work because they think it makes them look incompetent. The opposite is true. When it comes to case studies tell true stories, not some cookie-cutter fantasy.Read also:essays.uxdesign.cc🤫 Psst! My new online course UX Buddy helps designers create their UX portfolio, find, and get an awesome UX design job with a UX/design-mature company. It’s now live and enrolment is open for a couple more days. Check it out!----1UX CollectiveDesigner, writer, entrepreneur — Get my free web typography course 👉 betterwebtype.comHelpStatusAboutCareersBlogPrivacyTermsText to speechTeams

90% of designers are unhirable?. You can and should describe all the messy details in the Action part (Fig 2).Here are a few tips on how to use the STAR framework and how to better present your work realistically, without embellishing everything to the point where it all looks perfect

90% of designers are unhirable?

This is the Worst Thing a DevRel Team Could Do - This Dot Labs - This Dot Labs. Their focus is getting the job done, and they talk to companies to solve problems in their development lifecycle, not to be on the receiving end of a pitch. But DevRel is none of these things.. At its core, a successful DevRel program builds strong bonds within their target market to ensure that developers can interface with a company or organization behind the product they’re using.. Instead of prioritizing numbers and eyes that contribute to a sales funnel, it focuses on enhancing developer satisfaction.. Instead, they incorporate a number of technologies within their product’s technical ecosystem to demonstrate its value to a developer’s workflow.. I had the pleasure of working with Doron Sherman during his tenure at Cloudinary as VP of Developer Relations.. We were able to attract non-Cloudinary users as well as organic search traffic of those looking for media use cases who would have otherwise gotten lost in the Cloudinary docs and/or could not find help through the Cloudinary blog or knowledge base.”. In order to support the adoption and retention of developers using a product, companies must have a space where developers can interface with them.. By creating open lines of communication, developers can provide immediate feedback about a product in a productive way to product and engineering teams thereby shortening the feedback loop and improving the speed at which a team is able to innovate based on user needs.. These forums also provide synergistic opportunities for developers that are using a product to learn from each other.. They are on Discord, jumping on calls with developers, answering questions, and doing office hours, all of which are super valuable in building that community.. Contributors and developers that have supported us since before we were a company are what led us to where we are now.. On the other hand, internal programs build communities around their product, facilitating direct communication between developers and the company.. Do they simply distribute discount codes and free swag, or are they reaching out to their users, and providing them a platform to learn, collaborate with others, and contribute?. And if you ever have any questions or want to connect with a DevRel specialist, do not hesitate to reach out!...Nov 22, 20235 minsAlthough Developer Relations (DevRel) defies traditional marketing strategies, prioritizing enhancing developer satisfaction ahead of promoting numbers that contribute to a sales funnel, it is still possible for DevRel teams to fail at delivering desired business objectives.. Without buy-in, being able to work cross-functionally across the organization, get access to data needed for measuring success, have the ability to influence change within the organization, or get the budget for necessary activities to engage developers will be impossible.. By not doing so, the DevRel team will not be able to justify their work to leadership, which will lead to those positions being cut first when budget cuts come around.. These are the holy grails of DevRel, and because they do not understand, they will always be the first teams to let go if management can’t see the actual return or how it affects the bottom line.”. But, DevRel is about breaking barriers and building bridges, so, in leading by example, we demonstrated our technical knowledge and now have a strong impact on all the teams.”. I've had to push for them to include me in design meetings, and get them to understand that I'm the Lorax--I speak for the community!. DevRel requires a collaborative approach and alignment and synergy with other teams.. Francesco Ciulla, Developer Advocate at daily.dev, a professional network for developers that provides the latest tech news and articles, shares his thoughts on how DevRel organizations can be successful within larger organizations: “DevRel organizations can thrive within larger organizations by establishing clear communication channels and fostering meaningful collaborations.. There will not be a clear vision the team can drive towards, leading to wasted efforts and the inability to produce tangible outcomes.. If DevRel does not have any goals set, they can only do their best to assume what efforts they should invest in to provide value to the organization.. Expectations left open to interpretation often lead to a poor impression of the performance of the DevRel team by decision-makers, and those teams are never able to establish a sense of trust or direction within that organization.. Generally, that DevRel hire is someone relatively new in the industry, so you can coax them to start at a new company without clear goals or objectives.. Without free access to cross-functional team data, it is difficult to show the value and ROI of DevRel.. This is just one example of and a subset of metrics a DevRel team should consider tracking, but what you track and how you track it is dependent on your goals and the product.. Since there were no metrics, there were no objectives to measure against to say what was good and what was bad.. Once metrics began to be implemented, the company started pushing her to do more, and she had nothing to push back with because the high-level goals were not there.. The current strategy is sponsoring local meetups for a few months and seeing what the result is.. The reason for the relaxed nature of the testing phase is that they don’t want to be pushy to the meetup organizer to find something out or measure something.. DevRel is naturally iterative and requires a team to experiment, test, and refine their strategies.. Experimentation and iteration help teams refine their knowledge, identify patterns, and develop strategies that resonate with developers.. It’s also important to acknowledge that building domain expertise within a segment as well as building relationships and trust with developers in that segment takes time.. Beyond this, in a recent conversation that Core Team Member Mark Thompson had with the Modern Web Podcast, he expressed the team’s unequivocal support for third-party and community tools for supercharging the Angular framework to best serve developers.. NGX-Bootstrap is an open source library brought to the community by the team at Valor Software, and allows developers to quickly integrate all of the v3 through v5 Bootstrap components under Angular into their application.. This is not an exhaustive list, and there are so many amazing tools and libraries being built every day.. They explore the evolution of engineering management over the past decade, reflecting on the shifts in technology, team dynamics, and project management approaches.. They explore the balance between process and people, noting the importance of daily meetings for accountability and productivity.

This Dot Labs RSS feed

This is the Worst Thing a DevRel Team Could Do

Juan Diego Rodríguez (also known as Monknow) is a front-end developer from Venezuela who loves making beautiful websites with modern technologies but also …More aboutJuan Diego ↬Weekly tips on front-end & UX.Trusted by 200,000+ folks.A fun fact about me is that my birthday is on Valentine’s Day. This year, I wanted to celebrate by launching a simple website that lets people receive anonymous letters through a personal link. The idea came up to me at the beginning of February, so I wanted to finish the project as soon as possible since time was of the essence.Having that in mind, I decided not to do SSR/SSG with Gatsby for the project but rather go with a single-page application (SPA) using Vite and React — a rather hard decision considering my extensive experience with Gatsby. Years ago, when I started using React and learning more and more about today’s intricate web landscape, I picked up Gatsby.js as my render framework of choice because SSR/SSG was necessary for every website, right?I used it for everything, from the most basic website to the most over-engineered project. I absolutely loved it and thought it was the best tool, and I was incredibly confident in my decision since I was getting perfect Lighthouse scores in the process.The years passed, and I found myself constantly fighting with Gatsby plugins, resorting to hacky solutions for them and even spending more time waiting for the server to start. It felt like I was fixing more than making. I even started a series for this magazine all about the “Gatsby headaches” I experienced most and how to overcome them.It was like Gatsby got tougher to use with time because of lots of unaddressed issues: outdated dependencies, cold starts, slow builds, and stale plugins, to name a few. Starting a Gatsby project became tedious for me, and perfect Lighthouse scores couldn’t make up for that.So, I’ve decided to stop using Gatsby as my go-to framework.To my surprise, the Vite + React combination I mentioned earlier turned out to be a lot more efficient than I expected while maintaining almost the same great performance measures as Gatsby. It’s a hard conclusion to stomach after years of Gatsby’s loyalty.I mean, I still think Gatsby is extremely useful for plenty of projects, and I plan on talking about those in a bit. But Gatsby has undergone a series of recent unfortunate events after Netlify acquired it, the impacts of which can be seen in down-trending results from the most recent State of JavaScript survey. The likelihood of a developer picking up Gatsby again after using it for other projects plummeted from 89% to a meager 38% between 2019 and 2022 alone.Although Gatsby was still the second most-used rendering framework as recently as 2022 — we are still expecting results from the 2023 survey — my prediction is that the decline will continue and dip well below 38%.Seeing as this is my personal farewell to Gatsby, I wanted to write about where, in my opinion, it went wrong, where it is still useful, and how I am handling my future projects.Meet Smashing Email Newsletter with useful tips on front-end, design & UX. Subscribe and get “Smart Interface Design Checklists” — a free PDF deck with 150+ questions to ask yourself when designing and building almost anything.Once a week. Useful tips on front-end & UX. Trusted by 207.000 friendly folks.Kyle Mathews started working on what would eventually become Gatsby in late 2015. Thanks to its unique data layer and SSG approach, it was hyped for success and achieved a $3.8 million funding seed round in 2018. Despite initial doubts, Gatsby remained steadfast in its commitment and became a frontrunner in the Jamstack community by consistently enhancing its open-source framework and bringing new and better changes with each version.So… where did it all go wrong?I’d say it was the introduction of Gatsby Cloud in 2019, as Gatsby aimed at generating continuous revenue and solidifying its business model. Many (myself included) pinpoint Gatsby’s downfall to Gatsby Cloud, as it would end up cutting resources from the main framework and even making it harder to host in other cloud providers.The core framework had been optimized in a way that using Gatsby and Gatsby Cloud together required no additional hosting configurations, which, as a consequence, made deployments in other platforms much more difficult, both by neglecting to provide documentation for third-party deployments and by releasing exclusive features, like incremental builds, that were only available to Gatsby users who had committed to using Gatsby Cloud. In short, hosting projects on anything but Gatsby Cloud felt like a penalty.As a framework, Gatsby lost users to Next.js, as shown in both surveys and npm trends, while Gatsby Cloud struggled to compete with the likes of Vercel and Netlify; the former acquiring Gatsby in February of 2023.The Netlify acquisition was the last straw in an already tumbling framework haystack. The migration from Gatsby Cloud to Netlify wasn’t pretty for customers either; some teams were charged 120% more — or had incurred extraneous fees — after converting from Gatsby Cloud to Netlify, even with the same Gatsby Cloud plan they had! Many key Gatsby Cloud features, specifically incremental builds that reduced build times of small changes from minutes to seconds, were simply no longer available in Netlify, despite Kyle Mathews saying they would be ported over to Netlify:However, in a Netlify forum thread dated August 2023, a mere six months after the acquisition, a Netlify support engineer contradicted Mathews’s statement, saying there were no plans to add incremental features in Netlify.That left no significant reason to remain with Gatsby. And I think this comment on the same thread perfectly sums up the community’s collective sentiment:Netlify’s acquisition also brought about a company restructuring that substantially reduced the headcount of Gatsby’s engineering team, followed by a complete stop in commit activities. A report in an ominous tweet by Astro co-founder Fred Scott further exacerbated concerns about Gatsby’s future.Lennart Jörgens, former full-stack developer at Gatsby and Netlify, replied, insinuating there was only one person left after the layoffs:You can see all these factors contributing to Gatsby’s usage downfall in the 2023 Stack Overflow survey.Biilmann addressed the community’s concerns about Gatsby’s viability in an open issue from the Gatsby repository:He also shed light on Gatsby’s future focus:So, Gatsby gave up competing against Next.js on innovation, and instead, it will focus on keeping the existing framework clean and steady in its current state. Frankly, this seems like the most reasonable course of action considering today’s state of affairs.Yes, Gatsby Cloud ended abruptly, but as a framework independent of its cloud provider, other aspects encouraged developers to look for alternatives to Gatsby.As far as I am concerned, Gatsby’s developer experience (DX) became more of a burden than a help, and there are two main culprits where I lay the blame: dependency hell and slow bundling times.Go ahead and start a new Gatsby project:After waiting a couple of minutes you will get your brand new Gatsby site. You’d rightly expect to have a clean slate with zero vulnerabilities and outdated dependencies with this out-of-the-box setup, but here’s what you will find in the terminal once you run npm audit:That looks concerning — and it is — not so much from a security perspective but as an indication of decaying DX. As a static site generator (SSG), Gatsby will, unsurprisingly, deliver a static and safe site that (normally) doesn’t have access to a database or server, making it immune to most cyber attacks. Besides, lots of those vulnerabilities are in the developer tools and never reach the end user. Alas, relying on npm audit to assess your site security is a naive choice at best.However, those vulnerabilities reveal an underlying issue: the whopping number of dependencies Gatsby uses is 168(!) at the time I’m writing this. For the sake of comparison, Next.js uses 16 dependencies. A lot of Gatsby’s dependencies are outdated, hence the warnings, but trying to update them to their latest versions will likely unleash a dependency hell full of additional npm warnings and errors.In a related subreddit from 2022, a user asked, “Is it possible to have a Gatsby site without vulnerabilities?”The real answer is disappointing, but as of March 2024, it remains true.A Gatsby site should work completely fine, even with that many dependencies, and extending your project shouldn’t be a problem, whether through its plugin ecosystem or other packages. However, when trying to upgrade any existing dependency you will find that you can’t! Or at least you can’t do it without introducing breaking changes to one of the 168 dependencies, many of which rely on outdated versions of other libraries that also cannot be updated.It’s that inception-like roundabout of dependencies that I call dependency hell.To me, one of the most important aspects of choosing a development tool is how comfortable it feels to use it and how fast it is to get a project up and running. As I’ve said before, users don’t care or know what a “tech stack” is or what framework is in use; they want a good-looking website that helps them achieve the task they came for. Many developers don’t even question what tech stack is used on each site they visit; at least, I hope not.With that in mind, choosing a framework boils down to how efficiently you can use it. If your development server constantly experiences cold starts and crashes and is unable to quickly reflect changes, that’s a poor DX and a signal that there may be a better option.That’s the main reason I won’t automatically reach for Gatsby from here on out. Installation is no longer a trivial task; the dependencies are firing off warnings, and it takes the development server upwards of 30 seconds to boot. I’ve even found that the longer the server runs, the slower it gets; this happens constantly to me, though I admittedly have not heard similar gripes from other developers. Regardless, I get infuriated having to constantly restart my development server every time I make a change to gatsby-config.js, gatsby-node.js files, or any other data source.This new reality is particularly painful, knowing that a Vite.js + React setup can start a server within 500ms thanks to the use of esbuild.Running gatsby build gets worse. Build times for larger projects normally take some number of minutes, which is understandable when we consider all of the pages, data sources, and optimizations Gatsby does behind the scenes. However, even a small content edit to a page triggers a full build and deployment process, and the endless waiting is not only exhausting but downright distracting for getting things done. That’s what incremental builds were designed to solve and the reason many people switched from Netlify to Gatsby Cloud when using Gatsby. It’s a shame we no longer have that as an available option.The moment Gatsby Cloud was discontinued along with incremental builds, the incentives for continuing to use Gatsby became pretty much non-existent. The slow build times are simply too costly to the development workflow.I still believe that Gatsby has awesome things that other rendering frameworks don’t, and that’s why I will keep using it, albeit for specific cases, such as my personal website. It just isn’t my go-to framework for everything, mainly because Gatsby (and the Jamstack) wasn’t meant for every project, even if Gatsby was marketed as a general-purpose framework.Here’s where I see Gatsby still leading the competition:I briefly glossed over the good parts of Gatsby in contrast to the bad parts. Does that mean that Gatsby has more bad parts? Absolutely not; you just won’t find the bad parts in any documentation. The bad parts also aren’t deal breakers in isolation, but they snowball into a tedious and lengthy developer experience that pushes away its advocates to other solutions or rendering frameworks.I’ll go on record saying that I am not replacing Gatsby with another rendering framework, like Next.js or Remix, but just avoiding them altogether. I’ve found they aren’t actually needed in a lot of cases.Think, why do we use any type of rendering framework in the first place? I’d say it’s for two main reasons: crawling bots and initial loading time.Most React apps start with a hollow body, only having an empty <div> alongside <script> tags. The JavaScript code then runs in the browser, where React creates the Virtual DOM and injects the rendered user interface into the browser.Over slow networks, users may notice a white screen before the page is actually rendered, which is just mildly annoying at best (but devastating at worst).However, search engines like Google and Bing deploy bots that only see an empty page and decide not to crawl the content. Or, if you are linking up a post on social media, you may not get OpenGraph benefits like a link preview.This was the case years ago, making SSR/SSG necessary for getting noticed by Google bots. Nowadays, Google can run JavaScript and render the content to crawl your website. While using SSR or SSG does make this process faster, not all bots can run JavaScript. It’s a tradeoff you can make for a lot of projects and one you can minimize on your cloud provider by pre-rendering your content.Pre-rendered pages load faster since they deliver static content that relieves the browser from having to run expensive JavaScript.It’s especially useful when loading pages that are behind authentication; in a client-side rendered (CSR) page, we would need to display a loading state while we check if the user is logged in, while an SSR page can perform the check on the server and send back the correct static content. I have found, however, that this trade-off is an uncompelling argument for using a rendering framework over a CSR React app.In any case, my SPA built on React + Vite.js gave me a perfect Lighthouse score for the landing page. Pages that fetch data behind authentication resulted in near-perfect Core Web Vitals scores.Gatsby and rendering frameworks are excellent for programmatically creating pages from data and, specifically, for blogs, e-commerce, and documentation.Don’t be disappointed, though, if it isn’t the right tool for every use case, as that is akin to blaming a screwdriver for not being a good hammer. It still has good uses, though fewer than it could due to all the reasons we discussed before.But Gatsby is still a useful tool. If you are a Gatsby developer the main reason you’d reach for it is because you know Gatsby. Not using it might be considered an opportunity cost in economic terms:Imagine a student who spends an hour and $30 attending a yoga class the evening before a deadline. The opportunity cost encompasses the time that could have been dedicated to completing the project and the $30 that could have been used for future expenses.As a Gatsby developer, I could start a new project using another rendering framework like Next.js. Even if Next.js has faster server starts, I would need to factor in my learning curve to use it as efficiently as I do Gatsby. That’s why, for my latest project, I decided to avoid rendering frameworks altogether and use Vite.js + React — I wanted to avoid the opportunity cost that comes with spending time learning how to use an “unfamiliar” framework.So, is Gatsby dead? Not at all, or at least I don’t think Netlify will let it go away any time soon. The acquisition and subsequent changes to Gatsby Cloud may have taken a massive toll on the core framework, but Gatsby is very much still breathing, even if the current slow commits pushed to the repo look like it’s barely alive or hibernating.I will most likely stick to Vite.js + React for my future endeavors and only use rendering frameworks when I actually need them. What are the tradeoffs? Sacrificing negligible page performance in favor of a faster and more pleasant DX that maintains my sanity? I’ll take that deal every day.And, of course, this is my experience as a long-time Gatsby loyalist. Your experience is likely to differ, so the mileage of everything I’m saying may vary depending on your background using Gatsby on your own projects.That’s why I’d love for you to comment below: if you see it differently, please tell me! Is your current experience using Gatsby different, better, or worse than it was a year ago? What’s different to you, if anything? It would be awesome to get other perspectives in here, perhaps from someone who has been involved in maintaining the framework.Tips on front-end & UX, delivered weekly in your inbox. Just the things you can actually use.With practical takeaways, live sessions, video recordings and a friendly Q&A.Everything TypeScript, with code walkthroughs and examples. And other printed books.With a commitment to quality content for the design community.Founded by Vitaly Friedman and Sven Lennartz. 2006–2024.Smashing is proudly running on Netlify, TinaCMS and Swell.Fonts by Latinotype.

The End Of My Gatsby Journey — Smashing Magazine. I’ve even found that the longer the server runs, the slower it gets; this happens constantly to me, though I admittedly have not heard similar gripes from other developers.

Articles on Smashing Magazine — For Web Designers And Developers

The End Of My Gatsby Journey

Sign upSign inSign upSign inJake GellerFollowUX Collective--ListenShareThe topography of initiatives a Design Operations team encounters is incredibly varied. They may spend one week traversing a large cross-functional program, the next digging into an ad hoc software request, and the following navigating an unanticipated re-org. Add to that the challenges of effective change management, ongoing upkeep, and limited resources… well, it can be disorienting at times.In this article, we’ll walk through practical strategies to chart your course: how to identify your team’s needs, prioritize opportunities, and distill a focused (yet flexible!) DesignOps roadmap. Additionally, we’ll cover how to bring partners along for the journey and build the trust you’ll need to drive meaningful change.Whether you’re in an established Design Operations function or starting your first 30 days as a team of one, your job is to listen and to learn before introducing change. In order to identify and prioritize opportunities for a DesignOps roadmap, you first need to understand the current state of the UX org: what are the pain-points, cross-functional gaps, and other team needs that DesignOps can meaningfully address?A variety of methods are available to go about this. A common approach if you are a new DesignOps leader is an interview-based listening tour (sometimes called a discovery tour). For a great primer on listening tours, see Adam Fry-Pierce and Salomé Mortazavi’s discussion The first 90 Days of the Head of DesignOps and Tova Soroka’s Listening Tour Playbook. Other supplemental methods may include leadership workshops, pulse surveys, retros, and more.Method is less important than intent and outcome: seek to understand prior to introducing change, and cultivate relationships with the ICs, managers, and cross-functional partners who will inform and adopt the processes and programs your team introduces.Whichever approach you take, your next step is to synthesize learnings and document a Lay-of-the-Land, a current state audit, and an assessment of DesignOps focus areas. This document is a living, collaborative artifact that partners UX and cross-functional leads. We break it down by People, Process, Systems, and Cross-functional initiatives — but align your Lay-of-the-Land with the model you use to discuss DesignOps within your org.For each area of focus, document:Once you’ve captured a Lay-of-the-Land, your next step is to identify, scope, and prioritize the right initiatives for your roadmap. You’ll have top-down and bottom-up approaches to consider in tandem:If your org has company-level Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) or your UX team has function-level OKRs, how can you define DesignOps OKRs that roll-up in support of them? If these higher-level OKRs do not exist, define OKRs to support your DesignOps mission statement. Documenting objectives and measurable outcomes helps you select and prioritize the right initiatives to support them. For bonus points, further connect DesignOps OKRs to individual growth and performance goals!Work with your team to translate your Lay-of-the-Land into potential initiatives, based on the current state and feedback. Then, in a collaborative workshop with UX leadership, plot these initiatives on Impact x Effort grids (or your preferred framework). Once the participants reach a consensus on Impact x Effort placement, provide an opportunity to dot-vote or rank the initiatives.Next, triangulate initiatives to include on your roadmap using your DesignOps OKRs, Impact x Effort mapping, and bandwidth considerations. Some tips and recommendations:After identifying and prioritizing initiatives for the roadmap, you’re ready to put it together! Below are some practical tips to help you structure your actual roadmap artifact:Now that you’ve got the DesignOps roadmap identified, don’t underestimate the importance of sharing it. If possible, socialize your roadmap in a meeting or presentation setting with your UX team; we target twice a year (although the roadmap is updated more frequently). Let’s highlight how to make the most of this time:Cater your roadmap walkthrough to your audience and respect their time. No need to get into the granular details of each initiative; communicate your team’s objectives and visually tie roadmap initiatives to each objective:Your goal here is to craft a compelling and concise narrative:The mission of the DesignOps team here is [X]. In the first-half, we accomplished [Y], and in the second-half our objectives are [Z]. We have [A][B][C] initiatives planned to meet each objective. Here’s how to get involved!So you’ve shared your roadmap, what’s next? If you are new to the org or DesignOps is a newly formed function, building trust before executing larger roadmap initiatives is critical. A handy metaphor comes from Shopify’s Tobias Lütke in the form of a “trust battery” — expanded on here by Sarah Walsh. A trust battery signifies the level of trust we’ve built up with someone or some team.As a function that deals with a whole lot of change management, DesignOps gains plenty from charging their trust battery: a UX team more willing to try out and adopt new processes, cross-functional partners more willing to collaborate, etc. With the roadmap established, let’s highlight a few ways you can supercharge your DesignOps trust battery:Let’s look at an example of starting small: My DesignOps team was faced with the challenge of helping designers share work-in-progress across the whole UX team, to break down feature team silos and facilitate follow-up discussions where appropriate. Instead of developing a large new program or adding more meetings, we experimented using the last 15–20 minutes of our monthly UX Townhall for a “Rapid Fire” work in progress share. On a rotating group cadence, designers, researchers, and other UX functions presented their current work-in-progress in a 2–3 minute single slide presentation: a screenshot or gif, a few bullet points, and related links. The quick and simple format was enough to kickstart the right follow-up discussions amongst the team. After a couple of presentations, our Rapid Fire WIP Share became a huge hit!With these strategies in mind, hopefully the DesignOps wilderness is a little less daunting. Every organization is different, so flex these approaches as needed to support your team. Don’t forget: there are lots of DesignOps pioneers exploring the same problem spaces, so leverage the wonderful community (DesignOps Assembly 🎉) alongside your journey!----UX CollectiveDesign Operations @ Penn Entertainment (theScore + ESPN Bet)HelpStatusAboutCareersBlogPrivacyTermsText to speechTeams

Navigating the DesignOps wilderness. Let’s highlight how to make the most of this time:Cater your roadmap walkthrough to your audience and respect their time.