Salesforce Lightning Design System | Hacker News Reader

Salesforce Lightning Design System

lightningdesignsystem.com

81 pointswanghq22 comments

Wow, this is the first semblance of UX I've ever seen related to SalesForce. The actual product itself, while having a consistent design, is an absolute navigational and hierarchical nightmare for any use case I've had to use it for.

Consistent? Maybe as far as the presentation styling across the application, but the organization of where things are within the app is mind-boggling.

Seriously, I've done some custom Salesforce integrations for some clients, and every single instance has had a different looking admin configuration UI. Things are in different places, the same option is named differently, it's a mess. And this was all on instances that were ostensibly the same release version.

There are now four official administration interfaces you can in theory have with salesforce, one legacy blocky one that requires explicit configuration to stay on, two annoyingly similar layouts of the current production styling and now the "Lightning" version.

It's definitely a GIANT leap forward for SFDC. I don't know the history of their UX team, but I don't believe there really was an earnest one until the "SFDC Style Guide" that the Salesforce1 mobile app was built with came out.

The browser interface up until this year has predated anything that the Salesforce UX team has created, so it's quite possibly finally signaling that @benioff is committing to even HAVING a UX team.

This is truly awful. Flat design (no shadows/affordances of any kind) needs to die. Just look at this page and, without hovering, tell me what is and isn't clickable:

http://www.lightningdesignsystem.com/components/buttons

Whenever I see corporate-initiated projects like this, I wonder where it will be in 5 years. Open-Source projects that have gained popularity more 'organically' like bootstrap (despite the twitter backing!) seem to be a lot more resilient and more likely to be updated and upgraded as time goes on.

Do you really want your SaaS app to look like it was designed in 2015 forever?

The Salesforce plugin ecosystem (via AppExhange) is fragmented. Each app developer brings their own set of UI frameworks, resulting in a kludgy mess.

SLDS is a much anticipated and applauded UI standard.

I am skeptical that this will be kept up to date when a new manager thinks it's "good enough" and takes the wind out of the sails. Or if someone gets laid off that's in charge of the project. If they were to open source this project it would continue to live on even if the original contributors are no longer involved.

Open Source always wins in cases like this.

Are you sure you aren't comparing the best open source projects with the worst enterprise projects?

The Lightning Design System is open source. BSD 2-clause.

Probably targeted at plugins/extensions. At least thats the impression that I get by the phrasing they chose.

Though I don't see any restriction on where this can be used, it aims for building Salesforce apps.

> What is the Lightning Design System? It is collection of design patterns, components, and guidelines for creating unified UI in the Salesforce ecosystem.

http://www.lightningdesignsystem.com/faq

It was also mentioned at the time Microsoft's Office UI Fabric project got released. It is very likely that both projects aim to help third party developers get a consistent look, when developing add-ons for their applications.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10147797

Started using it in two app exchange apps, actually is pretty good, easy to use.

Yes it's targeted at salesforce new re-design, but that's not a limitation. Actually I am using it both inside of Salesforce as well as an standalone app ( that happens to use Salesforce data )

It's on github, they are answering issues consistently and has a modern foundation.

I am impressed that they pulled this off.

But.. But.. They said "No Software".

We ended up asking a third party to theme and provide a grammar over bootstrap for our SFDC front end work, I'm not seeing any great benefit over that (it even similarly requires a special wrapper element to isolate it from the standard SFDC styling.)

Really I'd have preferred that they had contributed a theme for bs3/4 rather than this.

It's not just a theme. It's not just a kit for designing apps that look like SFDC. It's the same design language as the new SFDC interface and it's the basis for that codebase.

Looks great, but I can't seem to find the license info anywhere.

A co-dependent Salesforce UI framework named "Aura" can be found here. https://github.com/forcedotcom/aura/blob/master/LICENSE

Apache 2.0

License is smack dab in the middle of the readme [0]. BSD 2-Clause.

[0]: https://github.com/salesforce-ux/design-system/blob/winter-1...

Ugh..hate the 'happy yet melodramatic' music background in the video.

Is Firefox a supported browser? I have some rendering issues in FF 41.0.2.

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