How “Versioning ” in SPECS saved the day for Patrick
Chapter 1: the day begun
Meet Patrick, a front-end UI developer for a one of the fastest growing startup in San Francisco. He loves building the beautiful interfaces that his UI design team gives to him. It’s one of the best thing he can imagine himself doing.
Patrick is very excited today. After all, there’s a major website update is about to go-live next week, Tuesday to be exact. He and his team has been working on this update for almost 3-months now. It’s just last few fixes and it’s all set.
It’s early in the morning, Patrick has just come to office. He is in a good mood, sipping hot Starbucks coffee and thinking about how he is going to finish the last-minute changes in next few hours and check-out some tech stuff for rest of the day.
Chapter 2: Something’s not right
With the same excitement, he reaches his desk and opens his laptop. His coffee is almost over so, all set to kickstart the day, he logs into his online collaboration tool where his design team had shared the specs for the design file.
He is about to start his play on keyboard to see designs to become a real product. But wait!! something’s not right.. ummm it can’t be, he says to himself.
He is panicking now.. design team has changed the design. They have been planning another UX research after the launch, they sent an email about it too.. Patrick even had a look at the email and thought that he will complete the design by Friday but some old fixes got the priority and now designs have been replaced. Gone..!
He is calling Rachael, product designer in his project. But much to his surprise, she is helpless, if she revert to the previous designs, it may interrupt in her user research. She can share the Sketch file but Patrick doesn’t have update SketchApp anymore.
Worst of Patrick’s nightmares were coming true… Looks like he is going to wait till Sunday evening, until design team completes their research and reverts the design. His date with Alisha is gone.
Chapter 3: Someone saved the day
What a way to ruin the day. He opens the collaboration tool again in despair and notices something new, something that he had not noticed before.. there was a tiny little icon which looked like version..
“It wasn’t there, might have been added recently.” He says to himself. He clicks on it with hopes and god answers.
He has list of all previous designs versions right in front of him.
Not only the the previous files, but also the changes were listed down.
Patrick was feeling blessed, Like he had not felt in long time. This sounds like a very trivial but not to Patrick. This meant a lot to him. This meant..
- He didn’t have to cancel his date with Trisha.
- No need to ask team to revert the designs.
- No more going from point to point looking for changes. He can review changes automatically.
Chapter 4: Patrick lived happily ever after..
Patrick was happy again for his day was saved. He took next 2 hours to complete the changes and in next 10 minutes he wrote an email to CanvasFlip team on how his day was saved with versioning in CanvasFlip SPECS.
But that’s not just one Patrick, if you come across this in your projects, it IS for you too.
Chapter 5: How you can save yours day too..
If you haven’t tried this before, I’m sharing quick 3-steps for you to get SPECS versioning for you too.
- Download the SketchApp plugin
- Login to your account and,
- Sync your artboards
- That’s all!!
All your synced files are available in your projects under SPECS tab. To access multiple versions, you can click on “version” icon on the bottom-left corner of your window.
Did you like versioning in SPECS? Or, need help.. Don’t hesitate to drop me an email on monika[at]canvasflip.com and I’ll revert almost instantly.
These are small things in life at critical times and become very important. At CanvasFlip, we appreciate them a lot. These stories and occasional successes gives us the confidence to move in right direction.
