Design artifacts

In Sourcegraph’s globally distributed remote environment, design artifacts are crucial for sharing and collaborating on design and a key part of how we design in the open.

We use Figma files, RFCs, Google Docs, GitHub issues, and more as artifacts. Artifacts give us a way to capture our ideas and thoughts, and then give us time to go away and give thoughtful consideration before providing feedback.

Decisions are made in design artifacts. While we can talk about things in synchronous sessions like Slack conversations or video calls, making decisions in artifacts helps others to understand the context around the decision and provide further feedback or ask questions in a self-contained space.

When a design artifact like a Figma file is a source of truth, designers are responsible for communicating this to their teams and for keeping those artifacts up to date.

It’s our role as designers to set expectations around our artifacts: what state they’re at, whether or not we’re ready for feedback, and what kind of feedback we’re seeking. Seeking feedback is a skill we’re always working to improve.

As a design team, we’re low-process. We avoid making artifacts for the sake of making artifacts. Instead, we make artifacts when it makes sense to help us communicate and collaborate, and we optimize for clarity and understanding.

That’s also why we don’t always create high-fidelity design artifacts. Sometimes, a simple sketch in Excalidraw or on paper is all that’s needed to communicate and agree on what should be done. It’s up to the project team to decide what’s right for their problem and context.