--- id: home title: Home sidebar_label: Home --- ## Introduction 🚝 Monorail is a visual language that's foundation has been built up on a Swiss grid system with modern visual and interaction design to produce human computer symbiosis. ## Monorail 🚝 Monorail is inspired by the New York Transit Authority Standards Manual. This manual helped the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) reproduce the visual language across every subway station, creating consistency, and a familiar experience to any user of the subway. Every sign has a spec that included it’s dimensions, content, and placement within a station. This clarity, repetition, and thoughtfulness helped communicate the information need for both commuters, and tourists. This cemented it as one of the best design systems of the modern age. At SimSpace, 🚝 Monorail sets out to do the same for the full range of products, services, and marketing needs of the company. Anchored on these three ideas, we move forward with a single goal, satisfying customers. ## Goals ### Clarity Every component must clearly communicate it’s purpose from both a UX and UI perspective. Text should be legible. Foreground and background colors should mesh well. User interaction should be clear, using large Interaction Areas for elements, defining every state like hover, focus, and active. We should strive to not leave the user confused, at the same time we must understand and embrace the complexity of the problem, knowing that the best solution is the one that is easy to use, not always the simplest, or most beautiful. ### Repetition Components should roll up into a UX pattern. These patterns cover most CRUD use cases across our application, and should be used as often as possible. Ask first how can you make your design match an already defined UX pattern before you think about changing it, or creating a new version. When we repeat UX patterns we help build the user up, making them more comfortable with our application. When we make a user feel safe, it encourages them, and also gives them the freedom they need to accomplish their objective. ### Thoughtfulness Every component is designed around the power user. This is not a social network, it is a complex enterprise application, and we should be designing for that user. That does not mean create bad design, but rather to have the experience be thoughtful, making it easy for the user to string many complex actions together while putting a smile on their face. With this in mind, always start with trying to understand the problem you must solve. Have the meeting with the domain expert in the company. Talk to stake holders about the end goal for a product or feature. Use the product in it's current state. Understand what the product is doing and the problem it is solving. Once you understand the problem, then you can create a thoughtful design for the user.