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by JusticeJuice
1171 days ago
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Autolayout is definetly a good approach. Webflow is a good commercial example, their builder isn't a canvas experience, it's a nested block experience, so you're forced to think about the layout from the start - and it works. I know of website design agencies who's staff are just designers who can't code - but they build everything they deliver to a clients in webflow. What webflow doesn't have to deal with compared to a tool for webapps, is that most websites are just static. Web apps have all this extra code mixed into the frontend for functionality - providers, routers, state management methods, api calls ets, all this extra stuff in your components that isn't just "view". Taking some generated static react and adding functionality is easy. But then coming back to a page 5 months later, and refactoring the design in Noya, and merging that new code with what's actually been built? Kinda tough. It really depends if code export is a core goal, or more a side effect. There's a lot of value imo in a tool for designers, devs, business owners, whoever at a company to mock up an idea really quickly, with something that looks like their companies actual design system. Like the napkin sketch on steriods - but then still implementing it traditionally. |
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Creating real designs and shipping to production within a constrained environment (e.g. https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/a-deep-dive-into-airbn...) can be super high leverage, so that's ultimately where we want to go. Right now every company that wants to do this has to build it themselves. We didn't use an off-the-shelf solution like Webflow at Airbnb (afaik) because there was no realistic way to integrate it into our stack. I'm not sure if Noya's code export will be what people end up using for this - maybe some kind of JSON-config or something else will be the more useful artifact.
As an analogy, Retool makes it easy to create internal tools, and is usable by more than just eng. But somebody on the eng team needs to first configure it a bit (e.g. plug in the company's data sources) before making real tools becomes possible/efficient. Noya will require a similar level of configuration to become usable in these more advanced scenarios, but we think the value it delivers will be worth the effort.