Introduction

Welcome to the Progress Infra 360 Design System (I3DS) also referred to as PWC (Progress Web Components).

I3DS is specifically designed to unify the design, interaction, and user experience across all products within the Infra 360 suite. However, its applicability extends beyond Infra 360 products, offering value for internal tools and vendor integrations as well.

This design system is a comprehensive collection of principles, standards, and best practices to guide the creation and implementation of Infra 360 features, modules, and applications. As a cohesive design language, I3DS establishes a common grammar and vocabulary, enabling the development of accessible, responsive, and efficient user experiences.

A Cohesive Experience

Progress serves a diverse, global audience. Users interact with various aspects of the Infra 360 product suite daily, with unique needs, preferences, and accessibilities. Each person may differ in physical or cognitive abilities, device type, and internet connectivity. These considerations must shape the design process from start to finish.

Familiar design patterns empower users to navigate seamlessly and intuitively discover new features. If pages and features within the platform share consistent metaphors, users feel grounded and can focus on their tasks rather than adapting to unfamiliar UI elements.

I3DS emphasizes cohesive user experiences to ensure that, regardless of where a user is within the platform, the interactions remain familiar and intuitive.

Inclusive and Accessible Design

Progress is committed to inclusivity, ensuring accessibility is central to every design decision. By embedding accessibility into the foundation of a project, I3DS promotes a design approach that respects diverse abilities and needs. Retroactively adding accessibility often proves challenging, so we aim to incorporate it as a core value in the design process.

Responsive Design

Infra 360 products are accessed on various devices and screen sizes, from desktops to mobile phones. Providing a responsive experience is essential to meeting accessibility requirements and delivering a seamless experience across all platforms. I3DS offers reusable patterns and components that facilitate the creation of responsive, accessible designs, empowering teams to focus on delivering value without reinventing design solutions for each project.

3DS adopts “responsive design” as a guiding principle, emphasizing adaptability to different device form factors and user preferences within these resolution guidelines.

While responsive design within I3DS is intended to be inclusive, it is also optimized for specific device resolutions. These targeted resolutions help maintain design integrity but may impose certain limitations on very small or very large devices.

Design for Efficiency

Progress products are built with productivity in mind. A key objective of I3DS is to support a streamlined, efficient user experience that minimizes friction between the user and the software. Through cohesive, inclusive, and responsive design practices, I3DS aims to create a calm and logical user journey, enabling users to remain focused and productive.

About

Infra UX Design System

The INFRA 360 Design System is a comprehensive set of design guidelines, components, and resources that provides a unified framework for designing and developing the next generation of products within the INFRA BU ecosystem.

INFRA 360 DS is designed to help our product teams create high-quality products that meet the needs of our users while also ensuring a consistent brand experience across all of our products.

What is a Design System?

Design Systems form a comprehensive set of values, semantics, syntax, and context that form the foundation of a shared design language for the entire team. The most recognizable feature of a design system is usually a collection of reusable components, guided by clear standards, that can be assembled together to build any number of applications. The system serves as an internal collaboration tool used by both designers and engineers, and includes a system’s rules and principles, the visual design elements, and the code that renders the UI. The end-users are the people that actually use our products.

A design system is a living, funded internal product with a roadmap & backlog, serving an ecosystem. It is not merely a collection of the assets and components you use to build a digital product. Rather, it is the culmination of several individual artifacts, which can include any or all of the following (and more):

Component Library / Charting library (where the code lives)
Code usage guidelines and docs
Accessibility guidelines
Style guide or visual pattern library
Design tooling (e.g. Figma Library)
Design usage documentation
Voice and tone guidelines
Brand guidelines

Some of these artifacts document and govern your design language, while others embody it. Combined together with an overall workflow, they form a design system.

Why a Design System?

Too few constraints

Software design has few physical constraints compared to many other design disciplines. This allows for a variety of solutions to any given challenge but also opens it to disjointed user experiences. As UX designers, we must create and follow our own constraints.

Multiple designers and stakeholders

Software is often built by teams– sometimes incredibly large teams– of people. The challenge to create coherent experiences multiplies exponentially as more people are added to the mix. Also, over time, no matter how consistent or small a team is, different people will contribute new solutions and styles, causing experiences to diverge.

Multitude of platforms

We need to ship our product on a multitude of platforms and devices. Keeping features and designs synchronized takes significant effort, often requiring the same work to be repeated across all of these platforms.

Software as a continuum

Another unique thing about software is that, while it can be considered a product, it doesn’t really wear out and get replaced like traditional consumer products. Code and designs created years ago still exist in many places, even after the landscape of a company and its product have shifted significantly. This requires constant maintenance and upgrading.