Improving Styling

A Chameleon Case Study

Initial Hypothesis

CSS is hard for some designers to write so lets make that easier.

• Initial idea was to create a better way to target CSS and later on to make writing CSS easier, possibly leveraging an AI co-pilot.
• Started to research and found a more complex problem.

Research

• From Customers:
  • Key styling functions are ignored because they are inadequate / low trust
  • Coding ability is highly variable amongst designers
  • Chameleon can be a blocker to rollouts where multiple themes are required
  • Specificity is hard to manage
  • Customers have problems managing large amounts of Account CSS
• From internal experience:
  • A lot of building happens by duplicating experiences causing CSS to 'collect'
  • The most successful accounts are when designers come in and set up Templates
• From my own experience redesigning experiences:
  • I wasn't confident adding things to account wide CSS since that may affect other experiences and I couldn't confidently test.
  • I found myself wanting to 'apply' the style of a template on top of existing experiences.
  • Creating templates for every survey type is time consuming.

Refined Hypothesis:

The writing of CSS isn't the most pressing problem, its the management of existing styles.

Early Designs

• First sketches:

• Early concept of 'Themes':

• Set up continuous discovery around styling to talk to customers, show early designs and refine our understanding of the problem.

The Messy Middle

• Design reviews with the product & design team

A crucial detail

• My face on realising I had missed a crucial property of how templates were being used by customers:

• Two paths were available:
  • Radically simplify the concept
  • Solve the problem of templates and themes interacting

Finally, an inspired idea (from our founder during design review) led to a way around the problem of templates and themes interacting together.

The Slipstream

A curious thing happens when the idea feels right, problems arise but so do solutions. Things starts to become obvious. Jason Fried describes this as 'good ideas have a slipstream'.

Chameleon - 2024