A lack of clear guidance has caused inconsistencies in the way we communicate status across our products, making it difficult to convey state and severity accurately.
Designers have clear guidance and understand how we should communicate status.
Our users can easily identify what requires their attention and its associated urgency.
As a new designer to the team, I noticed the lack of guidance and inconsistencies it created. I then led the re-design effort getting feedback along the way from others in the design system team.
These indicators are crucial for helping users quickly assess the importance of information and prioritise their actions accordingly, ensuring that critical information is easily recognisable.
As part of this work I created new pattern guidance for 'communicating status' and also defined two new design system scales 'Severity' and 'Visual Loudness' to enhance clarity and usability.
The Severity Scale helps prioritise user attention and action by categorising elements into levels like "Critical" or "Information", ensuring urgent issues are highlighted effectively.
The Visual Loudness Scale treats UI as a conversation, varying emphasis from subtle (e.g. background details) to prominent (e.g. critical alerts) to guide focus without overwhelming users.
Together, these scales help us to create a more considered and user-friendly UI.
We established clear guidance to help designers consistently communicate state and severity across our products.
A unified approach to status communication ensures users can quickly understand states and severity without confusion.
We expanded our design system with not only new pattern guidance, but also two new design system scales.
