IXD414, 'Design Systems', Spring 2025
MW / 3:20-05:50pm / Chalmers 307
Matt Kirkland / mattk@ku.edu

IXD414 - Designing with Systems

This is a studio course about designing digital products for the screen, with an emphasis on designing with systems in mind. This syllabus will be updated with more information throughout the semester. I'll let you know in class about updates.

Questions? mattk@ku.edu.

Atlas ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Let's try restricting ourselves to ONLY using a pre-built design system - and see what opportunities and limitations that affords.


You will design a new platform to make and share maps based on favorite books.

Your Client

For this project, you're in-house! You're the founding product designer at a new startup called Atlas, and you're going to build v1 of their first product. This will be a platform to make and share a map based on an already-published book.

Scope

This web app will let users create interactive maps of worlds from books. This can be a fictional world like Middle-Earth, with annotations that show Merry & Pippin's journey; or a map of the Real Earth that shows Marco Polo's travels to China. Here's a few example maps from books, but you can find your own examples.

Maps can be either an uploaded image (like Narnia) or a place in the real world (using google maps). Either way, we'll let the end user pan and zoom with map-like interface tools.

On the map, the creator can add pins with information about what happens there in the story. Maybe we want to let them do other things like... draw lines for a journey? Customize their pins? I don't know. Sounds complicated.

Each map will have information about the book it's from.

Each map is public and available for other people to see. They should be easy to share. Only the map creator can edit their map.

Users can sign up for an account, and then they can make as many maps as they like. They should probably have some kind of public profile page showing the maps they made.

Should we let more than one user make a map based on the same book? Or should users 'claim' a book? And... how do we manage that?

Everything will be free to users; the company might decide to monetize this later by adding affiliate referral links, pro accounts, advertising or #sponcon.

We'll need a homepage that explains how this works, and a search + search results to help people find books; probably some other stuff like that.

We'll work out a list of minimum user stories to support; you can add more if you think they are helpful or interesting.

Deliverables

We'll go step-by-step through specific design deliverables that get us closer to an interactive system to solve our client's problem. We'll discuss each deliverable before we start, but this will include:

  • User Stories
  • Wireframes
  • Prototypes
  • Guerilla User Testing

Your FINAL deliverable will be a full-featured figma prototype that shows a full set of user journeys.

Some other requirements:

  • We'll be designing for desktop sizes, but we might ask you to do a few example mobile views to prove you've thought about how to solve for different screen sizes.
  • We'll restrict ourselves to ONLY using the design system available at neobrutalism.dev (get the figma file!) and limit yourself to those components!