(Mods, feel free to move this to another board if it’s more appopriate somewhere else)
Hello everyone,
I’m the User Experience Director for Dell’s interactive design team, Global Site Design. I’m pleased to let the community know that we are opening up our Design Library to the public. You can visit the site at
http://www.delldesignlibrary.com. The site is still in its infancy, and we still have a lot of content to add, but we felt we were far enough along to share.
For those of you who were at MODXpo 2010, you may have seen our presentation on building the original site in Evo. Since then, we’ve upgraded to Revo, and completely revamped the site UI. If you missed MODXpo 2010 (shame on you!) here’s a little background on the site.
What is the Dell Design Library, and who runs it?
The Dell Design Library is run by Global Site Design (GSD), Dell’s internal interactive design group. We’re responsible for transforming Dell.com’s user experience across the site’s roughly 7,000,000 pages globally. Rebuilding a site on such a massive scale requires that you start with a firm foundation, so we created a modular design system consisting of a relatively small number of parts and templates that can be rearranged almost infinitely to build any desired webpage. These parts and templates, along with the instructions for using them, are housed in the Library.
Who uses the Library?
The Library is primarily used by Dell.com user experience designers and architects, web developers and content strategists, as well as our agency partners. Having an openly accessible set of standards enables us to drive a consistent experience regardless of who works on a web project – be it one of our 100,000+ employees, or one of our external partners.
We made a conscious decision to open the Library to the public in order to share our knowledge with the larger design community. In turn, we hope for the community to help us improve our UX methodology as well. If you have questions or comments about the Library, feel free to drop us a note.
How was it built?
We built the Library on a faceted classification system in which every document is tagged using closed vocabularies associated with a core set of attributes. Along with the attribute tags applied to each document, we applied an open folksonomy, which enables content authors to tag any document with a list of synonyms. For example, some banner variations are also tagged with their Dell-internal nickname, Godzillatrons (’cause, really, what’s bigger than a Jumbotron?). By using a folksonomy, we ensured that users could find things based on their nicknames as well as the official names.
Rather than running searches against keywords in the documents as most search engines do, we built a system that runs parametric searches against the meta-data from the information architecture described above. This provides more relevant results than you’re likely to get from performing a simple keyword search.
To manage content and tagging, and to help facilitate searches, we built the site on a pre-existing content management system, rather than choosing to code everything from scratch. After reviewing several options, we chose MODX Revolution as our platform. MODX provided us with a scalable solution that enabled a quick initial launch, thanks to its ease of integrating standards-based HTML/CSS templates into the CMS data using template variables. After our initial launch, we were able to expand the site’s functionality through MODX’s powerful PHP framework.
How can I learn more?
If you’re interested in providing feedback on the Library or our design system, you can comment here, or contact GSD directly with your feedback. If you like what you see here, and are interested in working with us, please contact us directly. We’re also available for speaking engagements to discuss our design system, the Library, or hamburgers.
Thanks for looking!
Jonathan Atkins
Dell, Inc.
jonathan _ atkins at dell.com
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