What impact is Storybook.js having on your team?
I’ve recently started using it with my team and the impact has been positive. Component sandboxing seems to encourage developers to encapsulate CSS within web components. Sandboxing also seems to encourage thinking about web component APIs and designing them for reuse.
How well is Storybook.js catching on as an emerging standard in UI development?
Re:Why Figma Wins
by karaterobot on Sunday June 21, 2020 @08:36PM
(#23596473)
We like Storybook a lot. It's made communication between Design and FE a lot smoother. I wouldn't say it clears up all ambiguity, or eliminates all redundancy, but it's a noticeable improvement over relying on institutional knowledge alone!
When I joined about six months ago, the team was already using it, and keeping it up to date had become ingrained in the culture. I had nothing to do with it, so I can say it's been a good decision.
I have no idea if it's catching on in the wider world! Anecdotally, of the five places I interviewed at last year, two of them claimed to be using it.
Re:Why Figma Wins
by httpsterio on Saturday June 20, 2020 @07:24PM
(#23588315)
There actually is proper version control for design! Abstract being the most fully featured, although only Sketch was supported the last time I checked. But yeah, in my case design debt is usually mainly born during exploration or when designs have a tight deadline and I don't take the time to organise my files and creating reusable components. I often end up with duplicates that I have to manually fix from there on out.
In theory, this means the designers are designing with components which are already represented in code, and as long as they update the library with any new or modified components, it should be straightforward: a change in the Figma library represents a change that needs to be reflected in Storybook.
But that's just the theory. In reality, designers often need to work quickly, and the idea of design debt is just as real as tech debt. Indeed, it's probably more of a problem, since there's no such thing as pull requests or automated regression testing for design, so it's harder to spot problems.
Figma already has a way to at least partially address this issue: they provide analytics that show you which of your components are getting detached, as well as a lot of other useful stuff. Unfortunately, the tier that allows this feature costs about 4x as much as the normal pay tier most people use.