Datadog on Building Responsive UX

Datadog product designers and frontend developers have been working together to create a new, better UX for creating dashboards, which is one of the most important parts of using Datadog. A central part of this effort was building a new layout engine. Working on this project was a bit different from the usual feature work, so the collaboration cycle between our developers and designers had to change for us to more closely and quickly design, build, and test constraints and new ideas in the browser.

In this session Ara Pulido, Technical Evangelist, chats with Edwin Morris, Senior Product Designer, and Amy Luo, Software Engineer on the Dashboards team. They cover the full end-to-end process of designing and building the new Datadog Dashboards: from the first prototypes, to the implementation of the layout engine that brings it all together.

By the end of the session you’ll understand the process we used, the roadblocks we faced, and how close collaboration and effective communication between designers and developers made this project successful—allowing engineers to effectively work within solid design constraints, and helping designers understand implementation limitations in a way that was useful for them to work around.

00:00 - Introduction
04:14 - Dashboards at Datadog
09:48 - Design
21:29 - Layout Engine
29:55 - High Density Mode
44:54 - Q&A