Constellation and prescribed design

Note: All information on this site pertains to the Constellation design system (8.8), but general patterns, components, and guidelines may also apply to the Cosmos design system (8.7 and prior). See resources specifically for Theme Cosmos and UI Kit.

The goal of design systems is to build cohesive, intuitive UX. But not all design systems work the same way.

Many enterprise design systems are plug-and-play— allowing designers to select UI elements and then assign functionality to those elements, thereby building workflows piece by piece. But this approach can result in a confusing and disjointed experience, leading to user confusion and a loss of productivity— and it takes longer to design and configure.

The Constellation design system works differently. It embraces prescribed design for designers, business architects and other non-technical application builders.

As a prescribed design system, Constellation offers out-of-the-box, prebuilt, and pre-designed workflows, patterns, and components that work together to create productive user experiences. By embracing prescribed design, you can use Constellation to build Pega applications without a professional developer. As a Constellation designer, you focus on articulating the business logic and desired user outcomes— while Constellation takes care of the UI design.

As a designer or business architect, the Constellation approach will help you:

• Deliver ideal UX for the core guided workflow paradigms that differentiate all Pega solutions
• Design and configure workflows that are proven to drive user action
• Focus more on the user's journey, not UI mechanics
• Avoid UI mistakes in your application
• Prototype, design, and configure your enterprise application much faster
• Get more value from your application, faster

With Constellation, your users will:

• Get work done without distractions
• Learn your application quickly through familiar interaction patterns
• Have access to built-in accessibility and localization support
• Enjoy an elegant, efficient and beautiful application design

As part of the Pega Product UX Design team, we keep design thinking at the root of our UX design solutions. Practicing design thinking means using empathy to craft valuable design solutions that cater to the needs of your audience.

Using this approach, we develop UI/UX solutions based on user feedback. This ensures our solutions provide efficient, easy-to-learn and powerful tools for front-end teams to solve higher-level UX and usability problems for enterprise organizations.

The Constellation design system is based on the following principles:

• Enterprise software must be designed for performance. Business applications must be productive and lead to efficient business outcomes for end users as well as developers and designers. Constellation prioritizes both end-user productivity and easier authoring by low-code and professional developers.
• Enterprise software should be easy to learn. We look for ways to re-purpose familiar interactions and UX patterns for enterprise, with the goal of greatly reducing expensive training time for end users, thereby saving onboarding costs for clients.
• Building apps should be simple for citizen developers & designers. We empower both technical and non-technical teams to deliver engaging experiences, instead of configuring complex software. The Pega Platform™ is an enormously powerful system— but our job is to take complex and powerful technology and make it accessible.