VCC UI 1.0.0 Is Here
Published
After some extensive testing and several release candidates, we're happy to finally announce the arrival of our first major release! VCC UI 1.0.0
VCC UI began last year as a collaboration between two product teams in our Gothenburg office. The initial goal of the project was to:
- Lower the unnecessary cost of design differences and implementations across product teams
- Provide a consistent Brand & UX journey for customers and end-users
- Increase developer happiness and productivity
The project quickly outgrew it's initial scope and ambition: Today it's used internally by multiple product teams in many different geographical locations. It's also used by external partners including advertising agencies and consultancy companies.
VCC UI is driven as an "Internal Open Source" project on GitHub. So far we've had 300+ commits from ~20 collaborators across the company.
Although the project has enjoyed some success, there have been some limitations and challenges that we now want to address:
- Limited project bandwidth (only one developer working full time)
- VCC UI is for React, what about other platforms/frameworks?
- No source of design truth
Are you a developer looking to upgrade? Read the
1.x Migration Guide
Eating our own dog food
As part of releasing 1.0 we've also taken the opportunity to rebuild the VCC UI website. Using Next.js and VCC UI we've been able to quickly put together a page that delivers high quality and good performance out of the box. We're now getting a full score on all Lighthouse metrics: performance, accessibility, best practices and SEO.
If you're interested take a look at the source code for this page.
What's next?
Now that we have 1.0 out of the way, what's laying ahead?
Design Language System
Volvo Cars as a company has decided to take a more holistic approach to solving the issue that VCC UI originally set out to do.
We are taking a step back, and creating a solution that will benefit a wider audience: A Design Language System.
To do this, a Design System product team consisting of Designers, UX, Product and UI engineers has been formed, working full-time to deliver a sustainable system that will provide long term value for the company.
The system will be a set of guidelines and properties describing how to design and build products that align to the Volvo Cars brand, regardless of what tool/framework/platform you are building for.
Open Source
VCC UI is still a closed source project. However, we believe that open sourcing VCC UI and in extension, the Design System will improve the visibility and ultimately the success of the system as a whole.
We're currently in talks with Legal and IP and we believe we have clear path to materialize this within the near future.
Upcoming Components & Features
Looking forward, we'll increasingly be focused on delivering new features and components in VCC UI. For those of you who have access to our GitHub, you can view our backlog.
Get in touch
If you are on the Consumer Digital Slack workspace, you can find us on the #vcc-ui and #design-system channels.
Otherwise, feel free to send me an email at daniel.stocks (at) volvocars.com. As always you can also find more here: