Modular Web Design: Creating Reusable Components for User Experience Design and Documentation

Preface

By the Fall of 2007, I’d been working on—and become fascinated by—the component libraries that teams use to efficiently and consistently create user experience. I’d been “thinking components” for much longer. So when my family traveled back to my boyhood home in northeastern Ohio for Thanksgiving, I wasn’t prepared for the giant revelation that awaited me.

On the holiday morning, we were all sitting around the living room, and my mom dumped out a huge container of LEGO bricks in front of my 2-year-old son. He was awestruck and dove right in, putting all sorts of pieces together. As he built “ships” and other things, I uncovered the directions for building an actual, formal spaceship. He was intrigued, so I took advantage of a “teachable ...