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Original Source: https://ecommerce-platforms.com/articles/sumo-vs-leadpages

Are you struggling to narrow down the differences between SumoMe vs Leadpages?

Both of these tools are designed to give companies the solutions they need to capture information and contact details from their target audience.

However, the platforms approach lead generation from very different angles.

SumoMe, better known today as simply “Sumo” is a plugin for WordPress, built to make it easier to build an effective email list.

Sumo is simple, straightforward, and brimming with useful tools, like advanced email integrations, and A/B testing.

Leadpages, on the other hand, is a more comprehensive landing page builder and lead capture tool.

While SumoMe builds lead capturing functionality into your existing WordPress website, Leadpages gives you the freedom to build complex and comprehensive landing pages from scratch. It’s a more advanced tool than Sumo, with a wider range of customizations to choose from.

Table of contents

Leadpages vs SumoMe (Sumo): An Introduction

Leadpages vs SumoMe: Ease of Use

Leadpages vs SumoMe: Lead Generation Features

Leadpages vs SumoMe: Testing and Analytics

SumoMe vs Leadpages: Pricing

Sumome vs Leadpages: Final Verdict

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Let’s take a closer look at how the two services compare.

Leadpages vs SumoMe (Sumo): An Introduction

Let’s start by introducing both SumoMe (Sumo) and Leadpages. Both of these tools are excellent for capturing important leads on your website, through email contact forms.

With either Sumo or Leadpages, you can connect with your target audience, and start nurturing prospects. Both tools also integrate directly with WordPress, so you can publish pages and forms to your existing site.

Leadpages is one of the most popular landing page creation tools on the market. It offers support to tens of thousands of companies worldwide, allowing them to build custom pages, and forms for capturing customers.

Companies can capture customers through floating bars, pop-ups, scroll-triggered forms, and a host of other features.

Leadpages has a convenient WordPress plugin which allows you to publish your landing pages, pop-ups, and alert bars on your website instantly, without the need for complicated coding. Leadpages also has its own site building tools if you don’t have an existing online presence.

Some of the most interesting features of Leadpages include:

Multiple engagement options, including alert bars and pop-ups

Full website building or integration with existing site builders

Integration with social media platforms and email marketing tools

Real-time reporting and conversion optimization

Unlimited publishing and access to endless optimized templates

Excellent customer service and support

Sumo (previously SumoMe) is a plugin form builder and lead capture tool. The solution offers plugins for WordPress, Shopify, and Google Tag Manager, and helps companies to build state-of-the-art forms for collecting email addresses.

The more advanced packages come with A/B testing, enhanced visitor targeting, social media sharing, and email integrations.

SumoMe was designed to make it easier for companies to connect with leads through their existing websites, without having to design a new website or landing page from scratch.

The solution prioritizes ease of use, with a convenient and customizable interface, and a free service for beginners. Some of the most impressive features of Sumo include:

Social media sharing

Visitor targeting capabilities for segmented pop-ups

Email integrations and email campaigns

Ecommerce functionality for reduced cart abandonment

Discount codes and tools for increasing average order value

Insightful analytics for emails, forms, and more

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Leadpages vs SumoMe: Ease of Use

One of the first things you’re likely to consider when choosing a lead capturing tool for your business, is how easy the software is to use. Both Sumo and Leadpages are excellent in this regard, developed with user experience and easy adoption in mind.

Leadpages makes it quick and simple for companies to design a range of landing pages, pop-ups, alert bars, forms, and even their own websites.

There are two page-building options available, including and drag-and-drop editor, or a static editor. The code-free drag-and-drop functionality comes with access to a host of different templates you can use to make your pages stand out.

Leadpages also offers a range of helpful assets and knowledgebase articles to guide you if you ever get stuck when creating your own website or page.

The templates included are already optimized to boost conversions, and they’re all ready to work well on mobile devices. Plus, you can adapt your contact forms, alert bars, and pop-ups to suit any use case.

One of the best things about Leadpages is there’s no limit to how many pages and assets you can publish. You’re free to create as many forms and lead capturing tools as you choose, on any plan.

SumoMe was designed specifically for ease of use. The solution naturally integrates with Shopify and WordPress, so you can publish your pages and forms directly in your existing website, without having to create anything new. There’s also access to social sharing pages for reaching a wider audience.

SumoMe comes with access to a range of different apps, including an in-built list builder to integrate with your email marketing tools, and scroll box functionality. There’s also a highlighter, image sharing function, and useful analytics. The highlighter allows customers to highlight any portion of your page and share it directly with their social followers.

Like Leadpages, Sumo offers a range of resources and guides to help businesses get started. What’s more, even if you choose the free package, you’ll still get access to the one-on-one onboarding experience, to walk you through getting everything set up.

However, the templates available for your forms and pages are limited unless you upgrade to the premium plan.

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Leadpages vs SumoMe: Lead Generation Features

Where Leadpages and Sumo differ most is in the ways you can capture and convert leads for your website. Leadpages is a lot more advanced than Sumo, with a wider range of ways to connect with your customers.

To begin with, you’ll have more than 500 templates to choose from for a dedicated landing page, with access to a host of customization options.

You can sort through templates using tags and categories, or choose a template based on the specific industry you’re in. The landing pages come with built-in conversion guidance, fantastic lead collection components, and unparalleled page loading speeds.

You can also create a fully functional website with Leadpages. The websites available are mobile optimized, and easy to edit with no coding required. All of the templates for web pages are also designed to be high-converting.

Websites come with access to all of the other conversion and lead generation features of Leadpages too, such as pop-ups, opt-in forms, and alert bars. They promise phenomenal leading speeds, and built-in SEO to help attract the largest audience on Google.

Outside of landing pages and websites, Leadpages also offers access to:

Pop-ups: The highly customizable pop-ups ensure you can target your audience at the right time, with triggers for exit intent, events, and time delays. You can publish the pop-ups on WordPress, an existing website, or a landing page. Plus, you can connect your email service provider to your pop-up for easy lead capture.

Alert bars: Mobile responsive and quick to load, the alert bars in Leadpages come with flexible publishing options and links to opt-in forms. They’re easy to customize to suit your website layout, and connect to your email service.

Checkout forms: Leadpages checkout forms make it easy to accept recurring payments, sell your services online, and deliver digital products to customers. The checkout forms are powered by stripe for quick payment processing, and come with flexible publishing options.

Plus, you can create a range of other forms for capturing and collecting audience information according to your specific needs.

Sumo, or SumoMe, is a little less advanced, but it’s still a fantastic tool for lead capturing. The solution embeds into your existing website, so you don’t have to build a new site to get started.

With SumoMe, you can create fully-customizable email opt-in forms, and access convenient social sharing tools. There’s visitor targeting, so you can boost your chances of conversions too.

Sumo comes with support for unlimited subscribers on both the free and paid plans, and allows you to send 10,000 to 50,000 emails per month. There are built-in campaigns for welcome emails, and drip campaigns. Plus, you can access a range of integrations.

To help make the most out of the leads you capture, Sumo also comes with included ecommerce features. You can connect your store, use strategies to reduce cart abandonment, and leverage built-in discount codes.

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Leadpages vs SumoMe: Testing and Analytics

Leadpages and SumoMe both offer a variety of analytics options to help you make the most of your lead capture strategy. Both options come with A/B testing, so business leaders can examine the performance of one campaign against another.

SumoMe has an included integration with Google Analytics, so you can see how your campaigns are performing with one of the most popular tools on the market. There are on-page analytics, to show your site’s stats on each of your pages, without opening an app or leaving your site.

Plus, you can gather real-time information about how many people are visiting your site at any moment. Sumo also offers visitor targeting features, insights into your emails, forms, and other details, as well as behind the scenes views of your results.

Leadpages is also a fantastic tool for analytics. There’s an easy-to-use A/B testing solution, with unlimited functionality for any landing page.

You also get real-time analytics, to show you how your pages are performing in the moment, and there are third-party analytics integrations too. You can connect with both Facebook pixel and Google Analytics.

Leadpages also provides you with guidance to assist you in making the most out of your lead capture strategy. Real-time conversion tips are included alongside your analytics, to give you the best chances of finding more customers.

SumoMe vs Leadpages: Pricing

Budget is always a significant consideration for any business leader investing in new tools and technology for their website.

Both Leadpages and SumoMe have a few different options to choose from when it comes to pricing, so let’s explore your options.

Leadpages allows users to test the functionality of any package with a 14-day free trial. After your trial has finished, there’s no “forever free” plan, but the packages are relatively reasonable. Your options include:

Standard: $37 per month when paid annually: Support for a single site, access to landing pages, pop-ups, alert bars, unlimited traffic and leads, and a free custom domain. There’s also free hosting, lead notifications, 40+ integrations, mobile responsive templates, and tech support delivered via email and chat. Plus, you get a quick-start onboarding call.

Pro: $74 per month when paid annually: All the features of Standard, but with support for 3 sites. On top of the of these features, you also get online sales and payments tools, unlimited A/B split testing, and savings of up to $300 per year with annual billing.

Advanced: Custom pricing for all the sites you need, as well as all the features of the Pro plan. You can create 5 “client accounts” with access to the Pro plan. You’ll also get one-on-one onboarding for every account.

There are only 2 plans for SumoMe, with a money-back guarantee for 30 days for the premium plan. The first option is completely free, so you can start accessing lead capture tools straight away.

With the free plan, you get access to email opt-in forms, fully customizable designs, visitor targeting, social media sharing, welcome emails, email campaigns, integrations, store connectivity, and cart abandonment tools.

You can offer discount codes, and take up to $500 in sales. Plus, there are built-in analytics and one-on-one onboarding.

The paid plan starts at $39 per month, when you pay annually, and comes with all the features of the free package.

There’s also advanced visitor targeting, A/B testing, the option to remove Sumo branding, and support for 50,000 emails per month, instead of 10,000.

The premium plan includes advanced ecommerce design templates, advanced integrations, and unlimited stats from your emails and forms. You also get advanced analytics.

Sumome vs Leadpages: Final Verdict

Ultimately, both Sumo and Leadpages have a lot in common. Similar to other leading tools for lead capture like Thrive Leads, Optinmonster, Aweber, Clickfunnels and Convertkit, these tools both help bloggers, entrepreneurs and business leaders collect opportunities with automation.

Both of these tools have their own integrations with a range of other tools too, so you can link your campaigns to email tools like GetResponse and MailChimp, or create custom Facebook ads. There are even CRM connections for options like HubSpot and Salesforce.

The main difference between Sumo and Leadpages, is Sumo is relatively straightforward, designed for complete beginners who don’t want to worry about reading tutorials to set up the ultimate lead generation funnel.

While Leadpages is easy enough to get with a little practice, there are more advanced features like HTML customization.

Both tools are a little basic on the standard plans too, so if you want to really accelerate your conversion rate, we recommend testing the functionality and customer support, then upgrading to a more advanced package as soon as you can.

The post SumoMe (Sumo) vs Leadpages 2024 Comparison: Who’s Better? appeared first on Ecommerce Platforms.

Original Source: https://ecommerce-platforms.com/articles/squarespace-vs-shopify-vs-godaddy

When you’re ready to launch your store online, you need an eCommerce platform that will display your product beautifully and let buyers make purchases without any hassle.

And for that, today we have the top contenders: Squarespace, Shopify and GoDaddy.

All of them will help you create a robust online presence that you can use to sell your products. But of course, there are differences in these platforms. If you’re a new merchant and have been considering these three services, this article is for you.

We’re going to dissect these services piece by piece and examine them in detail. But first, a lazy version.

The TL;DR Version

Use Squarespace for visually appealing websites that offer beautiful designs and several customization features.

Use Shopify for everything related to eCommerce as it has versatile features for inventory management, payment processing, and a variety of third-party integrations.

Use GoDaddy for a quick website that offers simple services for a basic store. While GoDaddy is new to eCommerce, it comes with several features for merchants.

But you want all these features on your website, right?

Wouldn’t it be great if you could combine all three into one? While you can’t do that, you can select the best service.

We’ll discuss these services in detail so you can find out the best option for your store.

Let’s begin.

We’ve reviewed these platforms individually here: Shopify review, Wix review, and Squarespace review, and we’ve compared them one-on-one — see Shopify vs GoDaddy, GoDaddy vs Squarespace, and Squarespace vs Shopify.

Table of contents:

The TL;DR Version

Squarespace vs Shopify vs GoDaddy: Features

Squarespace vs Shopify vs GoDaddy: eCommerce Powers

Squarespace vs Shopify vs GoDaddy: Pricing

Squarespace vs Shopify vs GoDaddy: Visual Appeal

Squarespace vs Shopify vs GoDaddy: Marketing Options

Final Words

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Squarespace vs Shopify vs GoDaddy: Features

Let’s begin by understanding what these services are and what they offer.

Squarespace Features

Squarespace is a website building platform that offers a free website trial so you can understand how your prospective e-store will look like. Like most other modern website builders, you don’t need programming knowledge to create a website here.

Use its drag and drop features to fit elements into blank spaces and create an amazing store using pre-existing templates. Squarespace offers stunning templates that can make any website stand out. While it’s not specifically geared towards eCommerce, it includes several customizations and marketing features.

Let me summarize the major features of Squarespace.

Drag-and-drop Builder

You can just drag and drop the desired elements on the web pages. It’s pretty simple and anyone can create an eCommerce website on Squarespace without programming knowledge.

Template designs

It offers striking templates that look amazing and let you get started with website designing with minimum effort. The templates are responsive and you can create beautiful websites with them.

Readymade Layouts

Your eCommerce store will need several other pages apart from product pages. For example, you would need an About Us, Contact Us, and Portfolio, etc. Squarespace offers readymade layouts for these pages so you can add them in no time.

Various Types of Content

What type of content do you want on your website? Squarespace lets you have text, images, audio, videos, galleries, newsletters, products, appointments, reservations, menus, and so much more. This makes your website very versatile.

Sell Products, Services, or Subscriptions

With Squarespace, you can showcase your products, services, digital content, or subscriptions. You can even sell print-on-demand products on your Squarespace platform.

Categories and Sub Categories

Squarespace lets you create subcategories of products so you can easily manage inventory and your customers can browse them more easily in your retail store. This also helps SEO since categories are made automatically and search engines can index your website more clearly.

Inventory Management

The Squarespace dashboard lets you check the status of inventory in one place. You can even set up alerts with the stock levels go too low. The inventory management interface is pretty easy to use, which is useful for new merchants.

There’s so much more in Squarespace that I could go on. But for the sake of brevity, let’s move to the next platform, Shopify.

Shopify Features

I wouldn’t be wrong in saying that Shopify is the first crush of all retail merchants. Whenever it comes to setting up a website, Shopify is the first name that crosses our minds. At Ecommerce-Platforms, we get daily questions from online merchants and most of them are around Shopify.

Yes, Shopify is a great ecommerce platform. But there’s a reason why other platforms are still running. It’s not the best option for every store.

The best bit about Shopify is that it’s solely geared towards eCommerce. So if you’re solely looking for an eCommerce store, Shopify is a good choice.

But what is the reason why many merchants prefer other options such as Squarespace and GoDaddy?

Let’s see.

I’ll start examining the main features of Shopify.

Product Management

I’ve tried several eCommerce platforms, but Shopify has the best product management, hands down. Adding new products and organizing them in the right categories is super simple. You can also add product variants and track inventory.

Integrations

Shopify integrates with so many third-party services that everything is a breeze. Whether it’s your social media feeds, email marketing apps, shipping calculator, print-on-demand services, invoice generator, image optimizer, or just about anything – Shopify offers all types of integrations for your retail store.

Payments and Checkout

While there are several payment gateways that you can integrate with your retail store, some are built into the Shopify store, such as Shop Pay. It’s a secure payment gateway that you can easily activate for your Shopify store.

Use of Artificial Intelligence

Shopify offers artificial intelligence in its stores. For example, Shopify Magic lets you create product descriptions. All you have to do is add a product and enter its keywords – Shopify will create an automatic description for it. They are also going to roll out Sidekick really soon – an AI assistant that will manage small tasks for you.

Analytics

Shopify offers all kinds of analytics so you can track your visitor behavior. Whether you want to keep track of website traffic, sales, or customer behavior, all this data is available on your merchant dashboard. It creates reports for you so you get better insights for decision making.

These were the most amazing features of Shopify (of course there are more). Let’s move on to GoDaddy.

GoDaddy Features

For many years, GoDaddy was known only for its hosting services. But as more companies are coming into online store building, GoDaddy has brought its new range of services. Now you can create an online store with GoDaddy.

While GoDaddy is pretty new in this field, it has already gained the attention of merchants who have adopted its platform. The reason is simple – while the eCommerce options might be new, the brand name has been around for years and has been trusted by millions. Let’s see what GoDaddy has to offer to merchants.

Online Store Builder

GoDaddy lets you create your online store without any requirement of programming skills. You don’t need to have advanced technical skills to create your store, showcase your products, and customize the store.

Striking Visual Designs

Use GoDaddy Studio to create attractive designs in almost no time. With beautiful logos and color schemes, you can create a brand identity for your store. It also offers charming templates that you can customize according to your needs.

SEO Options

Since GoDaddy has been in the market for decades, they understand the importance of SEO and help you boost your site traffic by improving your rank on search engines. It also lets you integrate social media on your website.

Email Marketing

GoDaddy helps you create eye-catching emails to market your new launches or seasonal discounts. It also lets you track the results of your marketing campaigns so you can make tweaks accordingly.

Free Store Builder

This is an amazing feature to attract new merchants. You can create an online store on GoDaddy for free. You can play around and test its functionalities and features. And once you’re ready to launch your store for your customers, you can upgrade your plan and make sales.

Now that we have understood the services offered by these market giants, let’s begin comparing them feature by feature.

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Squarespace vs Shopify vs GoDaddy: eCommerce Powers

We all know that Shopify is the god of all eCommerce platforms. It’s way ahead of Squarespace and GoDaddy.

While Squarespace and GoDaddy focus on all types of website building (personal blogs, generic services, etc.), Shopify focuses solely on eCommerce. The entire team of Shopify works on making eCommerce a breeze for retail merchants.

While Squarespace and GoDaddy do feature eCommerce services, they belong to a different league.

Squarespace deals with all kinds of websites. Whether you provide accounting or legal services, you can create a generic website with it.

And GoDaddy has recently ventured into ecommerce. It was basically a hosting services provider. While it has been a trusted name for decades, it hasn’t been active in eCommerce for long. It still has a long way to go to compete with Shopify.

Let’s compare their eCommerce offerings.

Shipping

Squarespace offers several shipping options: Free Shipping, Flat Rate, Rates by Weight, and Carrier Calculated. Carrier Calculated is available only on some plans and only within the United States.

Shopify allows all those options plus Local Pickup, Location Based, and Product Price Based shipping. It also lets you enable third-party based rates during checkout. You can add rates depending on the provider – USPS, FedEx, UPS, etc.

Shopify also has tie-ups with other providers and can offer discounts for shipping within the United States. Plus, it offers carbon neutral shipping, which is good for the environment.

GoDaddy offers Free Shipping, Flat Rate Per Order, Percentage Rate Per Order, and Weight Based Shipping.

Inventory Management

Squarespace offers basic inventory management. You can edit the stock quantity and prices.

Shopify lets you add, update, and track inventory for all your products from one place. It also lets you track inventory that’s coming from your supplier.

GoDaddy also allows basic inventory management that lets you know how many instances of a certain product are remaining in the stock.

Payment Options

Squarespace lets you integrate PayPal, Stripe, or Square payment processors. While these three are the top payment options for people inside the US, non-US merchants might find it difficult to receive payments from their customers.

Shopify offers Shop Pay which lets merchants get payments quickly in their accounts. Apart from that, there are other options such as PayPal, Stripe, Amazon Pay, Meta Pay, and Apple Pay. It even lets you accept payments in cryptocurrency.

GoDaddy offers GoDaddy Payments, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and PayPal.

Conclusion: Shopify is the best when it comes to eCommerce offerings.

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Squarespace vs Shopify vs GoDaddy: Pricing

No matter how feature-rich a platform is, its usage is limited by pricing. If you cannot afford a platform, there’s no point in discussing its practicality. Let’s discuss the pricing plans of the three top platforms.

Squarespace Pricing

Squarespace offers four plans – Personal for $16/mo, Business for $23/mo, Commerce Basic for $27/mo, and Commerce Advanced for $49/mo.

As a merchant, you’ll need to go for Business or above plans as they come with eCommerce integration. And if you want to sell subscriptions, you’ll need the Commerce Advanced plan.

Shopify Pricing

Shopify is geared towards online merchants so there are no plans without eCommerce capabilities.

There are three main pricing plans: Basic for $39/mo, Shopify for $105/mo, and Advanced for $399/mo.

As you can see, Shopify prices are much higher than those of Squarespace. If you’re a first time online merchant who has just started selling and doesn’t want to invest too much, Shopify might come across as an expensive option.

Apart from these plans, Shopify also offers some other options.

There’s a Starter plan for $5/mo. This lets you sell your products through social media pages. The Retail plan comes with advanced staff and loyalty features and costs $89/mo.

If you’re into enterprise retail, there are commerce components for you. And Shopify Plus begins at $2,000/mo for high volume business.

GoDaddy Pricing

GoDaddy website builder offers three packages: Basic for $9.99/mo, Premium for $14.99/mo, and Commerce for $20.99/mo.

As a merchant, you’ll need to use the Commerce plan because the first two plans don’t come with eCommerce capabilities. You’ll get a free professional email with all these plans.

Comparing Squarespace, Shopify, and GoDaddy Prices

If you’re a small merchant and choose Squarespace, you can get started for $23/mo.

If you select Shopify, you’ll need to put in $39/mo. And for GoDaddy, you’ll need $20.99/mo.

This is probably the reason why many online merchants select other services over Shopify, even though it’s feature-rich.

Conclusion: GoDaddy is the most economical option here. Then comes Squarespace. And the most expensive is Shopify.

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Squarespace vs Shopify vs GoDaddy: Visual Appeal

Now that we’ve compared eCommerce features and pricing, the next thing a merchant looks for is the visual appeal of their store.

Squarespace offers 165 templates, and 40 of them are for online stores. As a retail merchant, you get to choose from only 40 templates.

All their templates are crisp and attractive. When it comes to visual appeal, Squarespace knows how to rule. If you’re a small merchant, you’ll like what Squarespace has to offer.

Shopify currently offers 173 templates, most of which are paid. Since Shopify is all about online stores, all these themes are for online stores only. All these themes are highly functional and useful. There are themes for small stores as well as big enterprise retail chains as well.

GoDaddy is rather new in this field and has only 24 templates for online stores. This means that as a merchant, your design choices are rather limited. The templates they offer look good but are pretty basic and for small store owners.

Conclusion: Shopify offers the biggest variety of templates for online merchants, followed by Squarespace.

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Squarespace vs Shopify vs GoDaddy: Marketing Options

Once your store is ready, how do you market it and how does your eCommerce provider help you with it? Let’s analyze our three platforms here.

Squarespace offers SEO tools so that your website ranks high on search engines. When you create a website, it is also optimized for mobile so it gets priority in the Google algorithm. It also offers a clean HTML markup that is easily indexed by search engines.

Squarespace lets you have social media sales channels and email marketing options. It also offers gift cards. Plus, Squarespace lets you integrate with third party tools that can offer other marketing features.

Shopify offers all the features mentioned above, plus more. There are Shopify native apps and most of them are free. For example, there is Shopify Email for email marketing, Shopify Inbox for business chat, and Shopify Flow for automation of tasks, etc.

Apart from the native apps, there are also many third party apps in the Shopify app store that you can install for marketing.

GoDaddy offers SEO tools and lets you connect to social media. It also lets you sell on marketplaces such as Amazon, eBay, and Etsy. For now, GoDaddy marketing options are rather limited.

Conclusion: Shopify offers the best online store marketing methods.

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Final Words

After testing all three websites and their features, it’s easy to see that Shopify offers the best options for online merchants. From design and functionality to sales and marketing, it’s clear why Shopify is the one name that crosses the minds of all online merchants.

So why do they settle for other platforms? The answer lies in pricing.

While Shopify offers amazing features, it comes with a heavier price tag. And this is the reason many small merchants opt to work with other providers.

Shopify has amazing pricing plans for small and big retail merchants but it might not fit everyone’s pockets. If you’re a first time merchant trying to make your store online, you might want to try other options that are available at more affordable rates.

And if you have an already established business and aren’t highly restricted by budget, Shopify will be the best choice for you.

So which one is it going to be? Comment and let me know.

Further reading 📚

Shopify vs Squarespace vs Wix (2023): The Battle of The Website Builders

Shopify vs Squarespace vs BigCommerce 2024 – Which is Best?

BigCommerce vs Shopify (2023): The Ultimate Comparison

The post Squarespace vs Shopify vs GoDaddy: The Ecommerce Showdown for 2024 appeared first on Ecommerce Platforms.

Original Source: https://tympanus.net/codrops/2023/12/15/frontend-rewind-2023-day-15/

Day 15 of our special calendar awaits with more frontend links from 2023.

Original Source: https://smashingmagazine.com/2023/12/building-components-consumption-not-complexity-part1/

Design systems are on the tip of every designer’s tongue, but the narrative in the industry mainly focuses on why you need a design system and its importance rather than the reality of endless maintenance and internal politics. The truth is that design teams spend years creating these systems only to find out that few people adhere to the guidelines or stay within the “guardrails.”

I’ve been fortunate with Figma to host and run workshops at various conferences across Europe that center on one very specific aspect of product design: components.

I love components! They are the start, the end, the hair-tearing-out middle, the “building blocks,” and the foundation — the everything within every great product design organization.

The reason they are so important to me is because, firstly, who doesn’t like efficiency? Second, and more importantly, they are proven to increase the time-to-delivery from design to engineering, and here comes a buzzword — they offer a route to return on investment (ROI) within design teams. This is becoming increasingly important in a tough hiring market. So what’s not to love?

Note: You may be interested in watching Matt Gottschalk’s talk from Figma’s Config 2023 conference, which was dedicated to the topic of ROI within small design teams. The talk explored how small design teams can use design systems and design operations to help designers have the right environment for them to deliver better, more impactful results.

Like in most things, a solution to this is education and communication. If you aren’t comfortable with modifications on styles, you may want to set up your components in such a way as to indicate this. For example, using emojis in layers is the quickest way to say, “Hey, please don’t edit this!” or “You can edit this!”.

Or, consider shipping out components that are named for intention. Would separating components entirely (components named for intention) work better? An Input/Error, rather than a customizable Input?

When considering the emoji name approach, here’s a set that I’ve relied on in the past:

Components
🚨 Deprecated
🟠 Not ready

Component instances
🔐️ Not editable
✍️ Overwritten name

Layers
✍️ Editable
🚨 Important

Component properties
◈ Type
✍️ Edit text
🔁️ Swap instance
🔘 Toggle
←️ Left
→️ Right
🖱 Interaction
📈 Data
↔️ Size

Flexible: Responsive Design

Ahh, our old friend, responsive design (RWD)!

“The control which designers know in the print medium, and often desire in the web medium, is simply a function of the limitation of the printed page. We should embrace the fact that the web doesn’t have the same constraints and design for this flexibility. But first, we must accept the ebb and flow of things.”

— John Allsopp, “A Dao of Web Design”

As it stands, there is no native solution within Figma to create fully responsive components. What I mean by “fully responsive” is that layout directions and contents change according to their breakpoint.

Here’s an example:

Note: It is technically possible to achieve this example now with auto layout wrapping and min/max widths on your elements, but this does not mean that you can build fully responsive components. Instead, you will likely end up in a magic numbers soup with a lengthy list of variables for your min and max widths!

With this limitation in mind, we may want to reconsider goals around responsive design within our component libraries. This may take the form of adapting their structure by introducing… more components! Do we want to be able to ship one component that changes from mobile all the way up to the desktop, or would it be easier to use, find, and customize separate components for each distinct breakpoint?

“Despite the fun sounding name, magic numbers are a bad thing. It is an old school term for ‘unnamed numerical constant,’ as in, just some numbers put into the code that are probably vital to things working correctly but are very difficult for anyone not intimately familiar with the code to understand what they are for. Magic numbers in CSS refer to values which ‘work’ under some circumstances but are frail and prone to break when those circumstances change.”

— Chris Coyier, “Magic Numbers in CSS”

Never be hesitant to create more components if there is a likelihood that adoption will increase.

Then, what does this look like within Figma? We have a few options, but first, we need to ask ourselves a few questions:

Does the team design for various screen sizes/dimensions? E.g., mobile and desktop web.
Does the development team build for a specific platform/screen size(s)? E.g., an iOS team.
Do you build apps aligning with native style guides? E.g., Material Design.

The answers to these questions will help us determine how we should structure our components and, more importantly, what our library structures will look like.

If the answer to questions 1. (Design for various screen sizes/dimensions?) and 2. (build for a specific platform/screen sizes?) is “No,” and to 3. (Build apps aligning with native style guides?) is “Yes,” to me, this means that we should split out components into separate component library files. We don’t want to enter into a world where an iOS component is accidentally added to a web design and pushed to production! This becomes increasingly common if we share component naming conventions across different platforms.

If the answer to question 3. (“Do we build native apps, using their design guidelines?”) is “Yes,” this definitely requires a separate component library for the platform-specific styles or components. You may want to investigate an option where you have a global set of styles and components used on every platform and then a more localized set for when designing on your native platforms.

The example below, with an example mapping of library files for an iOS design project, is inspired by my Figma community file (“Simple design system structure”), which I created to help you set up your design system more easily across different platforms.

→ Get “Simple design system structure” [FigJam file / Luis Ouriach, CC-BY license]

If you are designing across multiple platforms in a device-agnostic manner, you can bring components a lot closer together! If you aren’t currently working with an agnostic codebase, it might be worth checking Mitosis (“Write components once, run everywhere”).

A common challenge among development teams is using the same language; while one sub-team may be using Vue, another perhaps is using React, causing redundant work and forcing you to create shared components twice. In “Create reusable components with Mitosis and Builder.io,” Alex Merced explores in detail Mitosis, a free tool developed under the MIT license. Mitosis can compile code to standard JavaScript code in addition to frameworks and libraries such as Angular, React, and Vue, allowing you to create reusable components with more ease and speed.

Using A Variant

This may look like a variant set, with a specific property for device/size/platform added. For example,

As you can imagine, as those components increase in complexity (with different states added, for example), this can become unwieldy. Combining them into the same variant is useful for a smaller system, but across larger teams, I would recommend splitting them up.

Using Sections

You could consider grouping your components into different sections for each platform/device breakpoint. The approach would be the following:

Use pages within Figma libraries to organize components.
Within the pages, group each breakpoint into a section. This is titled by the breakpoint.
Name the component by its semantic, discoverable name.

There is a caveat here! I’m sure you’re wondering: “But couldn’t variables handle these breakpoints, removing the need for different components?” The answer, as always, is that it’s down to your specific implementation and adoption of the system.

If your designer and developer colleagues are comfortable working within the variable workflow, you may be able to consolidate them! If not, we may be better served with many components.

Additionally, the split-component approach allows you to handle components in a structurally different manner across these different sizes — something that is not currently possible with variants.

Auto Layout

Regardless of how we organize the components, responsiveness can be pushed very far with the use of auto layout at every level of our screens. Although it can be intimidating at first, the auto layout makes components work similarly to how they would be structured in HTML and CSS, moving design and engineering teams closer together.

Let’s take a simple example: a generic input field. In your main component, you’re likely to have a text label within it with the text, e.g., “Label.” Generics are useful! It means that we can swap this content to be specific to our needs at an instance level.

Now, let’s say you insert this component into your design and swap that “Label” content for a label that reads “Email address.” This is our override; so far, so good.

However, if you then decide to change your main component structurally, you put that label at risk of losing its overrides. As an example of a structural change, your original “Placeholder” now becomes a “Label” above the input field. Instinctively, this may mean creating a new text element for the label. But! Should you try this, you are losing the mapping between your original text element and the new one.

This could potentially break your existing signed-off designs. Even though this seems like it could work — layer names are a great way to preserve overrides — they are separate elements, and Figma won’t know how to transfer that override to the new element.

At this point, introducing component properties can save us from this trouble. I’d recommend adding a text component property to all of your text layers in order to try to prevent any loss of data across the design files in which we are using the component.

As I showed before, I find adding a writing emoji (✍️) to the property name is a nice way to keep our component properties panel as scannable as possible.

Content Specificity

A decision then needs to be made about how specific the default content is within the component.

And this is where we should ask ourselves a question: do we need to change this content frequently? If the answer is yes, abstracting specific textual values from components means that they can be interpreted more widely. It’s a little bit of reverse psychology, but a text layer reading “[placeholder]” would prompt a designer to change it to their local use case.

If the answer is no, we will bake the fixed value we want into the component. Going back to our input field example, we might set the default label value to be “Email address” instead of “placeholder.” Or, we could create an entirely new email address component! (This is a call we’d need to make based on anticipated/recorded usage of the component.)

Imagery / Media

When setting up a content system within Figma, a few different questions immediately pop up:

How do you use specific media for specific components?
How do you fix aspect ratios for media?

Within Figma, an image is essentially a fill within a shape rather than its own content type, and this impacts how we manage that media. There are two ways to do this:

Using styles.
Using component sets (variants).

Before we look at styles and components, though, let’s take a look at the format that all assets within Figma could take.

Practically, I would advise setting up your media assets as their own library within Figma, potentially even setting up a few libraries if you work across various products/brands with different approaches to media.

For example, the imagery your product team uses within design files and marketing materials is likely to be very different, so we would look to set these up as different Figma libraries. A designer using those assets would toggle “on” the library they need to create an asset for a specific intention, keeping the right media in the right place.

Because this media is the same as any other style or component within Figma, we can use slash naming conventions to group types of media within the names.

Domain examples:

Company website,
Product,
Marketing,
Sub brand/s.

Media types:

Logo,
Icon,
Illustration,
Image,
Video.

Example names, using the format:

Figma.com/Logo/Figma,
Figma.com/Icon/Variable,
Figma.com/Illustration/Components,
Figma.com/Image/Office,
Designsystems.com/Logo/Stripe,
Designsystems.com/Icon/Hamburger,
Designsystems.com/Illustration/Orbs,
Designsystems.com/Image/Modular grid.

These are split into:

Library: Figma.com or Designsystems.com,
Media type: Illustration or Logo,
Media name: e.g., Component libraries, Iconography.

Although I’m using images for the examples here, it works with video assets, too! This means we can move in the direction of effectively using Figma like a mini DAM (digital asset manager) and iterate fast on designs using brand-approved media assets, rather than relying on dummy content.

“A digital asset management solution is a software solution that provides a systematic approach to efficiently storing, organizing, managing, retrieving, and distributing an organization’s digital assets. DAM functionality helps many organizations create a centralized place where they can access their media assets.”

— IBM, “What is digital asset management?”

Using Fill Styles

Fill styles aren’t just for color! We can use them for images, videos, and even illustrations if we want to. It’s worth bearing in mind that because of the flexible nature of fills, you may want to consider working within fixed sizes or aspect ratios to ensure cropping is kept to a minimum.

Figma’s redline “snapping” feature lets us know when the original asset’s aspect ratio is being respected as we resize. It’s a pretty cool trick!

You can get the above example from Figma’s community:

→ “Fixed aspect ratio images with variants” [Figma file / Luis Ouriach, CC-BY license]

For this world, though, I would advise against trying to hack Figma into setting up fully responsive images. Instead, I’d recommend working with a predefined fixed set of sizes in a component set. This may sound like a limitation, but I strongly believe that the more time we spend inside Figma, the further we get from the production environment. “Can we test this in the actual product?” is a question we should be asking ourselves frequently.

Practically, this looks like creating a component set where we set the fixed sizes along one dimension and the aspect ratio along the other. Creating a matrix like this means we can use the Component Properties panel to toggle between sizes and aspect ratios, preserving the media inside the component.

This can be used in tandem with a separate set of components specifically for images. If we combine this with Figma’s “nested instances” feature within variant components, we can “surface” all the preferred images from our component set within every instance at the aspect ratios needed!

Arrangement

This is the hardest thing to predict when we think through the usability of customizable components. The simplest example here is our old enemy: the form. Instinctively, we may create a complete form in a component library and publish it to the team. This makes sense!

The issue is that when a designer working on a particular project requires a rearrangement of that structure, we are kind of in trouble.

This problem extends to almost all component groups that require manipulation. Tables, menus, lists, forms, navigation… we will hit this wall frequently. This is where I’d like to introduce the concept of fixed vs flexible content within components, which should help to address the future problems of a world where we put the DRY (don’t repeat yourself) principles at risk.

As design system maintainers, we naturally want to keep components as composable as possible. How can this one component be used in lots of different ways without requiring us to ship an infinite number of variations? This is the central theme of the DRY principle but can be challenging in design tools because of the lack of component order management within the main components.

As a result, we often end up in a world where we build, maintain, and ship endless variations of the same component in an attempt to keep up with snowflake implementations of our core component.

“‘When should we make something a component?’ is a question I’ve been fielding for years. My strong answer: right from the start. Creating things with a component-based mindset right out the gate saves countless hours — everything is a component!”

— Brad Frost, “Design system components, recipes, and snowflakes”

For example, the form we spoke about before could be one for:

Logging in;
Registering;
Signing up to the newsletter;
Adding billing information.

These are all clearly forms that require different data points and functionality from an engineering perspective, but they will most likely share common design foundations, e.g., padding, margins, headings, labels, and input field designs. The question then becomes, “How can we reduce repetition whilst also encouraging combinatorial design?”

A concept that has been long-used in the developer world and loosely agreed upon in the design community is termed “component slots.” This approach allows the design system maintainers to ship component containers with agreed properties — sizing, padding, and styles — whilst allowing for a flexible arrangement of components inside it.

Taking our previous form examples, we can then abstract the content — login form, register form, newsletter form, and billing information form — and provide a much simpler shell component from the library. The designers using this shell (let’s call it a “form/wrapper”) will then build their forms locally and replace the slot component inside the shell with this new custom main component.

This is best explained visually:

Does this custom component need to live in multiple files? If yes, we move it to the next level up, either team-level libraries or global, if working on a smaller system. If not, we can comfortably keep that component local to the specific Figma file on a page (I like to call it “❖ Components”).

Important: For this premise to really work, we must employ auto layout at every level, with no exceptions!

Conclusion

That was a lot to process (over five thousand words, actually), and I think it‘s time for us to stop staring at the computer screen and take a little break before walking through the next set of principles.

Go grab a drink or take some rest, then meet me in Part 2, where you will learn even more about the adoptable, indexable, logical, and specific components.