Artefacts
Working software
We could stop building websites and use figma. Someone soon will be tempted to use AI to wrap custom data in custom interfaces and switch off the Internet.
But until then, the three work horses of the web faithfully plod along beneath their ever increasing burdens.
Two of the horses, HTML and CSS, don't get much of a look in these days. It's all about JavaScript.
In many companies this has caused a breach between programming and web design. The living, moving part of pages and apps - what people see and interact with - is rarely discussed in developer meetings. It should be our source of truth.
The purpose of a team is not to create perfect designs from design systems that use components built in custom frameworks which are then replicated in component libraries.
We can reduce the creation of artefacts by removing the need for them. Artefacts have two purposes: experimentation and communication.
Easy to use, low fidelity tools are better for thinking. If you want to sketch half a dozen variations grab a pen and a piece of paper.
Artefacts can be useful as an asynchronous reference (their shelf life should be short) and sometimes nothing beats a quick illustration or the beautiful design that makes sense of a heap of disparate elements.
But the need for many artefacts can be avoided by bringing together the people responsible for creating a new function or product from the get-go.
And I mean the people who will do the work, not someone with seniority. Sorting and filtering information isn't a useful job for a lead.