When is the right moment in a project to create components & statuses?

[carlosv4986072]

Hello everyone in the community!

I'm working in a project with several pages and tables. Recently I've received feedback, (add one more column to the table) and what looked like a tiny thing involved a lot of manual work as there are tables in different pages and also variants of the same table (with/without cta, longer, shorter...). So imagine adding one more column to all these cases. 

I've started creating components to help me with that. But my question to you guys is: when do you think it's the right moment to do it? If you do it from the beginning it seems like a waste of time because after getting feedback probably some of the pieces will dissapear/change. If you do when the design is final it's not that useful as...well, you have already done all the changes manually previously.

Any idea on this?

Thank you in advance!

Carlos

[Spas K.]

Hey Carlos. You want to make the design system and components early, so you can apply changes in one place, and that will carry across all instances of that element, reducing manual adjustments. You can't really make them all in advance, because you will have to test how a certain element / style fits on a given page, and you might have to adjust the component just because of one screen. There's always going to be a bit of that. I normally start with the most complicated screens that have a lot of the elements, and when I know it works I make components and continue the rest of the pages.

Tables are especially tricky, because they hold a lot of data, and components aren't very useful because each table will have a different number of columns / rows. Some might have links or buttons etc. Repeat grid helps with tables. I remember making one row as a component, and using repeat grid. You can change the data on the second row and it will start repeating every 2 rows, so it doesn't all look the same.

If it has to be very realistic, there isn't much to do and you will be making a lot of manual adjustments.

[Wilder.Bolaños]

Hello there,

I would definitely use the components, yes, it is possible that in the future of the same, but if there are changes like the ones you propose you could save a lot of time, also as mentioned relying on the repetition grid, some things still require a lot of time and in the day daily to do in XD, I find myself with a lot of manual issue.

Greetings,

[carlosv4986072]

Hi guys,

Thanks a lot for your anaswers. In conclusion, use components after you know more or less what would work + use repeat grid for tables + assume there will be manual work.

Regards, 

Carlos