Introduction

Halstack's first goal is to provide Product Designers with pre-created designs for the most common use-cases they will face during the product design stage. Using Halstack, they don't need to reinvent the wheel looking for a solution to these mundane problems, and can focus on adding business value. Also, by centralizing these efforts in a Design System team, we can pay the right amount of attention to aspects as important as usability, accessibility, or consistency.

Halstack's second goal is to simplify the handoff process from designers to developers, and facilitate the development of the components and patterns that already exist as part of the Design System. This way, we speed up the development process and minimize the room for errors when implementing these components.

Unlike headless component libraries like Radix UI or Reach UI, which are intentionally agnostic of design decisions, Halstack is a highly opinionated Design System, and most of its value resides in its design opinions.

Halstack React library does expose a themes API that allows developers to override many of these opinions. Still, the themes API has its limitations, and it is considered a work around the Design System guidelines to allow a restricted level of white-labeling. That means if you are designing an application and you already have strong UI/UX opinions, Halstack might not be the right tool for you.

All the opinions provided by Halstack Design System always remain within the boundaries of the generalistic UI/UX Design domain. Halstack will not get into business-specific elements even if they are reusable. For example, Halstack might provide guidelines on using forms within the context of digital applications. Still, it doesn't get into the specifics of designing a form for an insurance quote application.

This design domain is noticeable by looking at the different configuration parameters in the Halstack React library, which resemble the language used by UX designers, without ever getting into the business semantics.

Although it doesn't get into the business domain, Halstack is currently used for the most part by insurance applications. For this reason, many of the decisions taken and the patterns observed might be influenced by this reality.

Halstack should always be considered as assistance to the Product Design process, but never as a replacement. Product Designers are still a fundamental piece of this process since they will need to add the business context, validate the patterns contemplated by the Design System, and contribute back to the design system when necessary.

These are the pre-defined design opinions explained by writing. They are contained on this website and describe, with a high level of detail, aspects like usage, existing variants, or design specifications of the identified patterns.

Implementing the previously described Design Guidelines so that product designers can easily drag and drop the pre-created components into their designs, obtaining automatic updates of these components as the Design System evolves.

Including tailored development tools that will assist React developers in implementing Halstack applications. This library attempts to bring the Design System guidelines to your application, minimizing the effort by abstracting developers from the implementation details while taking the design semantics into the code.