Infa Chrome Extension Alpha Release
Exciting News for Design System Practitioners!
With the Infa Chrome Extension, you can now manage your design system inventory directly within your product's webpage. Easily add components to Infa and visualize them directly on your web pages.
What Problem Are We Trying to Solve?
Today, if you want to learn about specific design systems, such as GitHub’s Primer, you typically refer to a dedicated knowledge base with a table of contents or a search feature to find and learn how to use different components.
The Challenge
Traditional design systems are often detached from the actual environments where they are applied. Users have to navigate away from their work context to explore external documentation or tools to understand component variations and usage.
Infa’s Solution
Instead of relying solely on a static table of contents for components, Infa allows users to visualize and interact with these components directly within their native environments—right where they are used, in the actual product within the browser.
Example
Take GitHub, for instance. With Infa, as users navigate through GitHub, they can see and interact with the design system components in action on actual product pages. Clicking on a component reveals detailed information from official documentation, Figma, or Storybook, integrated seamlessly into the workflow.
Benefits of Infa
- Immediate Context and Relevance: Visualizing components in their real use cases helps users understand how design elements function within the actual product environment.
- Enhanced Learning and Onboarding: New team members can quickly get up to speed by seeing how components are applied in real scenarios rather than abstract examples.
- Contextual Feedback: Users can highlight inconsistencies, suggest improvements, and even submit new components directly from the product.
- Connect References: Accelerate resource accessibility by linking directly to Figma, Storybook, and other essential tools.
- Conduct Inventory: Streamline your design system audit process by understanding component variations across your product.
Alpha Release Features
- Discovery Mode: Visualize all design system components directly on the web page, showing how they are implemented in real-world contexts. This enhances understanding and usage by allowing users to see components in action.
- Boards: Keep all your component highlights organized directly within your Chrome browser. Whether you're aligning your team, conducting inventories, refining components, or researching externally, Infa’s boards keep you on track.
- Main Components: Add components directly within the Chrome extension with relevant links and notes. Tag them and create component views to visually represent their usage on actual web pages.
- xPath Selectors: Enable specific selection based on element paths, IDs, or classes. Define roles once and automatically highlight all related components on the page, even as product elements shift.
- Markdown Support: Copy text from any web page and paste it into notes to transform it into markdown, allowing for easy inclusion of images in main component descriptions, enhancing the documentation's richness and utility.
Getting Started
To begin using the Infa Chrome Extension, sign up on the Infa.ai website to receive a link to the extension. Explore community boards or create new ones, and start adding and tagging components directly within your product’s web pages.
