Share your beta states and let the community do the work of researching, testing and finalizing. By the way, you can also build trust by letting your community know what’s going on.
GOV.UK publishs new components with the label experimental. This invites the community to start researching for this component and to share that result.
— Nick Colley, GOV.UK / Source (YouTube)
Adobe built a tool called Spectrum Precursors. This is a website where they list all beta components and things they are working on, which aren’t ready but might be useful. This platform promotes transparency in their design team.
— Sarah Federman, Adobe / Source (YouTube)
Build credibility and trust by sharing the roadmap 3 or 4 months before any big version release. So the teams know what was coming on the pipeline.
— Bethany Sonefeld, IBM / Source (YouTube)
→ Changelog and roadmap of the Carbon design system
With the first release of the New Brand Design of our client, 100% of the designs were beta states. None of the designs had yet been converted into developed components. We integrated our designs into the Living Styleguide in the same way as components: Instead of code, we integrated images.
After some time the first component images were replaced by code. This led to a mixture of design drafts and code components. The external users didn’t understand this mixture. Now all of these design state components have a very large warning on top of the documentation with a link to the GitHub contribution guidelines.
When we worked on e.g. patterns, we did not share any WIP state. We usually discussed with our developers and waited for all the details to be finalized. Of course this took an extremely long time. We didn’t have a tool or an area in our Living Styleguide where we shared WIP states.
If we had published these states, we also wouldn’t have the time / resources to handle the feedback.
— Anna Stumpf, SinnerSchrader
You should never display design components with ready-to-use components in the same style in your library. If a component is still in beta status and this has not been marked, the user will not be able to trust the library.