This is Rimble
Adaptable components and design standards for decentralized applications
We are all used to common patterns on the web today; logging into an app with a username and password, putting items in a shopping cart and paying with a credit card, changing a profile picture, and countless others. Over time, designers and developers have coalesced around standard practices for these essential interactions, leading to more consistent user experiences. That consistency engenders familiarity and trust — which, in turn, improves usability.
Ethereum and decentralized applications (dApps) promise to reshape the ways we use digital products — from identity to economics. But with that promise come new challenges — new UI patterns that offer little of the familiarity and trust we are accustomed to on the web. Users struggle as we ask them to learn new rules and new ways of interacting with websites and apps.
Of course, dealing with new UI patterns in dApps is a challenge for designers and developers too. The emerging blockchain development community does not have the wealth of mature tools and standards available to traditional digital product teams. As different teams take different approaches, often having to reinvent the wheel, users are forced to learn new patterns and ways of working for every dApp they use.
The ConsenSys Design team seeks to improve dApp user experience for everyone with Rimble — an open source design system offering a set of adaptable React components and design standards for decentralized applications. Rimble is a dedicated team of designers, developers, and researchers who will work within Consensys and with the broader Ethereum community to build lightweight, reusable components that address the most critical needs of users and of product teams working on dApps.
Simply put, we aim to make it easier to build dApps with outstanding user experience. We are continuously researching and testing existing and new UI patterns. We are building developer-friendly components that solve real problems without creating new ones. We are working across the community to establish design standards that respect and address the emerging needs of users in this space.
We are early on in this project. In the few months since we formed this team, we have focused on auditing current UI patterns, understanding the needs of designers and front-end developers, and identifying priority user scenarios. We are making our work in-progress available, starting with a small set of basic components. Today these are just building blocks. We are very excited about what comes next.
We are currently working with research and design partners within Consensys to create the initial Ethereum-specific components in Rimble. To start, we are collaborating with our friends at MetaMask, The Bounties Network, and uPort as we design the first set of these components. Some of our top priorities include patterns for connecting a wallet, displaying a user identity, completing a transaction, and communicating transaction status. Over the coming weeks, we will be iterating on our existing components and adding some of these new ones.
And most importantly, we need input from this amazing community of designers and developers! Please check out our GitHub repo and Storybook. Install Rimble and tell us what you think. We are starting small because we need this system to work for dApp developers, from the ground up. Help us make dApps better for everyone!
