Rivet quarter in review — Q2 2019

Levi McGranahan, design system lead, hosted a call today in which he summarized the progress the Rivet team has made toward the goals we laid out for Q2 2019 in the roadmap.

This blog post recaps the key takeaways from Levi’s Q2 progress report.

• Watch or listen to the quarterly review
• View the quarterly review slide deck

Goal: Hold the first Rivet Community Workshop #

Status: Done

Back in April, we hosted the first-ever Rivet Community Workshop at the Cyberinfrastructure Building. This workshop was a one-day event where developers came together to learn about Rivet, contribute new components, and meet others using the design system.

The event was well-attended by a variety of people, including developers from UITS, VPCM, and many of our edge partners. Each [tutorial track lesson]((https://v1.rivet.iu.edu/blog/spring-2019-workshop-slides.md" >}})) filled up within the first few days of registration and participants in the coding track collaborated to create new components like the process step indicator.

On the back of both our post-workshop survey and informal feedback we received at the event, it’s clear that folks had a very positive experience. We intend to hold a similar workshop this fall that incorporates the suggestions we heard from attendees, including a deeper dive into the Rivet codebase for experienced developers and a longer project share.

Goal: Restructure documentation around base styles, components, patterns, and templates #

Status: Ongoing

We’ve been collaborating with the User Experience Office to create wireframes for a restructured Rivet documentation site that better emphasizes the core building blocks of the design system: base styles, components, patterns, and templates.

We’ve marked this goal as ongoing, as some major organizational changes were recently announced that have a significant impact on the next generation of Rivet. We plan on fully implementing the new information architecture when the next major version of the design system takes shape.

Q3 2019 preview #

Next quarter, we’ll be spending a lot of time doing research for the next major version of Rivet that will serve as a unified design system for all of IU.

We’ll also be working closely with UXO to assess the effectiveness of Rivet’s existing design patterns and identify opportunities for new (or better) patterns that address common use cases. Some of this work is already being applied to the in-development Rivet Application Starter, which we previewed at the community workshop.

We’ve also partnered with the new dedicated IU Web Framework team to help them align the next generation of their framework with the new design system. Work has already begun on header and footer components useful for both web applications and informational websites.