BrightUI Principles
Our vision is to provide the tools needed for building an incredible HR platform.
From our perspective, BrightUI aims to bring order and consistency to Bright products and the processes behind building them. We elevate the user experience and increase the speed and efficiency of how we design and build products.
Principles behind BrightUI
These are the values we use to build and maintain BrightUI.
With absolute honesty, BrightUI isn’t currently fully compliant with some of our principles, but we’re working on it every day. These principles help us keep on track and stay focused on the right things.
Find the best middle ground
There are 4 key aspects when working on BrightUI. Our goal is to meet somewhere in the middle—so everything we do isn’t just consistent or composable, but improves the work of our designers and developers and is maintainable in the long-term.
Our goal sits at the overlap of consistency, designer/developer experience, maintainability, and composability.
Be transparent
Transparency is the key to success. That’s why we have open feedback channels in Slack. But we’re trying to go further. We document our design decisions so we can reference them in discussions and not reinvent the wheel again by discussing stuff repeatedly and without historical context.
Listen and react
The first and most important part: nothing in BrightUI was done without research. We listen to users, actively ask for feedback, and act on users’ needs. When answering, provide enough context. Don’t let people wait for our answers. Their job may be blocked by BrightUI and they may rely on us to help them.
Make things intuitive
Not many people read the documentation. Our goal is to make everything as simple as possible, ideally self-explanatory. We believe that consistency is followed closely by clarity. We encourage experimentation. We welcome new solutions. But our focus is on using patterns and vocabulary that are familiar to our users.
Give designers and developers just enough control
The priority for BrightUI designers and developers is to always deliver the feature they need to work on. And they expect BrightUI to be a tool that just works. Give designers and developers delightful components and provide enough flexibility in how to assemble them for the specific use case they have. Ensure consistency in visual interactions, but allow designers and developers to extend components by their own actions.
Guide with documentation
We decided not to document obvious things such as the visual style of components. The purpose of our documentation is to be a partner who helps solve a problem when people build with BrightUI. We always aim to make our documentation available at the right moment and in the right context.
Set appropriate defaults
The best scenario is when designers and developers take our component and it works. There is no need to dive into the deep waters of the documentation for simple properties or to understand how a Figma variant works.