Design System Tiers

Why Tiers?

When LUCI launched a few years ago – we anticipated that the design system would grow and would benefit from additional tiers to make and share ideas, design assets, code, and documentation. For those that have used and managed design systems - a candidate feature starts with an idea useful to meet a product’s specific use case. Other colleagues and teams might have that same idea or use case they wish to meet. Sooner or later, that use case may be applicable for most everyone.

As a result, LUCI and other design systems at NetApp are built to reflect “Design System Tiers.” LUCI is the “core” tier, relevant to everyone and is managed and documented by a core team. A community of designers and developers are influencers to the LUCI core. With a tiered system, secondary tiers are encouraged to support features and use cases that may not belong to the core - only relevant to the products that they serve.

With a tiered system, we can improve and enhance quality feature sets in planned releases, bringing features and use cases upward through a design system architecture that we all share and drive, as a community.

Design System Tiers at NetApp

LUCI, by design, is tech-stack agnostic. Properties that have implemented their own LUCI-inspired solutions are encouraged to submit those to be included as Tiers that other properties may use, or to have relevant aspects that would serve within the LUCI core. Get in touch, here.

• Nwf.js Design System – a LUCI-inspired design system for building web applications in Angular (NetApp VPN access required)