Will there be (more) visual documentation content?

[hbehrens]

This morning, @NiVZ was sharing (ironically, on the Pebble Discord chat) a link to a blog post by Lawson Knight from Fitbit that walks the reader through some of the design decisions behind the Ionic UX/UI.

Not only does the post provide a good number of example screens and watch clock faces in a decent resolution (50% of the actual size), the many screenshots also depict some of the standard components of the SDK and how they are meant to be used (or at the very least were originally intended / going to be used once fully opened).

To me personally, this post is very valuable as I can learn more about the design language used in the product. Without access to the real thing (and frankly, not ever having used any predecessor of Fitbit's Ionic), I have a hard time choosing colors, margins, font sizes, etc. – not to mention the iconography.

This is why especially one of the later paragraphs caught my attention:

As with most products at this quality level, there seems to exist a(n internal) interface design guide that walks developers through the decision making when crafting new screens!

While the actual post I copied these images from (thanks again @NiVZ for digging this up) covers a lot more (e.g. it gives a glimpse at the animations used in the system) it is still way too short for my personal taste and I hope that at least some of the material will be opened up to the broader developer community such that we can benefit from the work that was apparently already done.

Equipped with such a document that could evolve into something similar to the iOS Human Interface Guidelines or the Android Material Design Documentation ugly screens coming from 3rd-party developers could be an active choice instead of ignorance 😜

Any chance the current documentation will be extended in this direction?

[JonFitbit · Accepted solution]

Another great question Heiko! We're still finalizing the design guidelines, but we will have a version of this on the developer website very soon. We value our community feedback greatly, so we'll be working iteratively to improve the quantity and quality of our documentation.