Look & Feel

Your product’s interface is settled by a document, not by design work. Taiga drafts three overall looks, three navigations and three form conventions, picks one of each that work together, and describes the result in plain language. You see the chosen combination as one screen, and you can swap any part of it. Everything Taiga plans and builds afterwards is grounded in what stands there.

You do not need any interest in design for this. Every choice is a real, rendered screen; you judge with your eyes, not from a description.

Where it starts

In the project’s document list, the Look & Feel row sits in its own User Interface Design group, above Service Design. It unlocks once the specification and the user flows are published; the drafts themselves are drawn from the specification. An imported project is not offered one: its documents are derived from its code, and there is no specification of its own to draw a look from.

Choose Generate on the row. The row shows what Taiga is doing while it works: drafting the concepts, choosing a combination, writing the summary, publishing. You can leave the page; the row keeps reporting, and the document appears when it is done.

The row is optional. Discovery completes without it, and you can come back to it at any point.

What Taiga chooses, and why

Taiga does not pick three favourites. It reads all nine drafts and picks the combination whose density, type and use of colour agree, so the navigation, the page and the form read as one product. Each pick carries a one-sentence reason, and the reasons are shown under the summary as Why this combination.

A pick Taiga made is labelled Taiga’s pick wherever it appears. It is a proposal you can overrule, never a decision made for you.

The document

The page shows the chosen direction as one screen: the chosen navigation frames the page, the chosen overall look fills it. The screen has two views of the same navigation: A page shows a page in the chosen look inside it, and A form shows the chosen form conventions inside it. A caption under the switch says which one is showing. While editing, the screen switches by itself to the view your pick lives on: pick a form and the form view opens, pick a look and the page view returns. Choose Full screen to judge it at the size of your browser window; Escape or Exit full screen returns you to where you were. While editing, the screen stays in view as you scroll the list of alternatives beside it.

Under the screen is What you will see: a short account in plain language of what the product will look like and feel like to use. The technical record that planning and building read from is kept on the page too, folded away under Technical notes for planning.

The document is versioned. Changing a pick later publishes the next version rather than rewriting history, and the earlier version stays in the document’s history.

Changing a pick

Choose Edit on the document. A list of alternatives appears beside the screen, by name, three for each of the look, the navigation and the forms: the current pick and the two newest others. They are names rather than pictures because the screen beside them is the picture: the whole direction stays in view while you change it.

Select an alternative and the screen updates at once. Changing the look keeps the navigation you had; changing the navigation keeps the look. Nothing is saved while you look. Choose Cancel to leave editing without keeping your changes. If you navigate away with unsaved choices, Taiga asks before discarding them.

Save keeps your picks as a draft, the same way edits to any other document are kept. The draft is yours to come back to: the page says you are editing a draft that is not live until you publish it, and offers View published, Discard draft and Publish. Nothing downstream reads the draft.

Publish records the picks and has Taiga rewrite the summary for them, then publishes the next version. The page stays readable while that happens: the screen already shows the new picks, and the summary says it is being rewritten until the new one lands. If recording a pick fails partway through, the draft stays and the page tells you how many picks were recorded.

An alternative drawn before this page could compose screens is kept under Show all and marked as showing as tiles, so you know before picking it that the screen will change to three tiles. If a picked concept cannot be drawn, the screen says which part failed and shows the rest.

Asking for more alternatives

Each surface in the panel has Propose 2 more. It keeps your current pick and drafts two fresh alternatives for that surface, built to fit the other two picks as they stand. While they are drafted the list says so; when they arrive they take the two other slots.

Older alternatives are not deleted. They fold away under Show all; nothing is deleted.

When the document is behind

A pick can be recorded without a publish following it, for example when the summary rewrite fails after Publish. Then the document says it is behind the chosen look & feel and offers Republish. Until then, anything generated from the document is grounded on the current picks, not on the older version.

Why the drafts look the way they do

The drafts say which of two situations you are in, under the panel of alternatives.

With Taiga’s own design standards, the drafts are close to what the finished product will look like, because Taiga owns the whole vocabulary they are drawn in.

With a linked design system, the drafts are deliberately plainer in composition, but in your own colors. Taiga can read your design system’s colors, but not yet its components, so the drafts use generic components rather than pretending to use yours. Plainer means “generic components in your brand”, never gray.

If your linked design system’s colors could not be read, the drafts say so and are drawn in neutral defaults instead of a guess at your brand.

Directions chosen earlier

A direction chosen before this page could show it as one screen is shown as three separate tiles instead, with a note saying so. Regenerate on the document drafts a fresh set that can be composed.