Shifting Focus from Design and Development to Managing and Marketing a System — Design systems result in tangible, often gorgeous outputs like a living style guide or array of design assets. When getting started, it feels like a project, evolving from early concepts to a celebrated (first) release of those assets for other people to use. “We did it! We launched a guide…

Getting to the Root of What Your System Really Is — Defining design systems seems a daunting challenge. It’s not as if our community hasn’t made many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many attempts. …

From Pitching a Strategy to Launching 1.0 and Beyond — Starting a design system to serve a product portfolio isn’t a typical project. Sure, the effort produces recognizable outputs like a visual language and UI components. Making it should feel familiar, cycling through iterations of design, development, and documentation. However, the system’s promise isn’t a delivered library. The system’s promise…

Core Beliefs to Guide System Strategy and Tactics — I’m wary of design principles. I find some inspirational (like my favorite, Salesforce Lightning’s Beauty, which focuses on craft). Yet, in-house teams can spend months defining principles too vague (“Be Magical!”) or generic (“Simplicity!”, as if most efforts crave complexity) to be useful. These principles then surface rarely if ever…

Address “How Do I…?” Questions to Form Processes That Matter — Early on, design system efforts can focus on defining what a system is or fret over principles. However, conversation can shift swiftly towards defining and documenting how it works. Stakeholders want answers to: How do I … add a component I designed to the library? Contributing Designer How do I…

Communicate What You’ll Do Next That Teams Can Depend On — Whenever I chat with a new design system team, I ask: So, what are you working on? Some teams muster only an incoherent rambling of scattered tasks. Others confidently articulate discrete areas of focus, and when they plan to deliver each one. …

A Playbook for Working with Product Teams & Managers — Your systems pitch got a green light. You’ve started designing, building, and documenting your library. Your first big release approaches fast! Hey, don’t forget your customers. During that formative period, you’ll begin aligning with product teams intending to adopt your system so that you can: Help them adopt based on…

Use OKRs to Set Goals & Track Progress — As an advocate of your system practice, can you paint the picture of what success looks like? And, is it measurable? I’ve had some success helping system teams express goals in the form of objectives and quantifiable key results: Objective: Where do we want to go? Key Result: How will…

Accessibility is an Adopter’s Job Too, and They’ve Got Work To Do — In late 2016, I helped pitch a design system all the way up to executives that included the CEO, COO, CPO, Head of Design, and other peers. The pitch’s mood shifted when accessibility came up: “Oh, our teams will make accessible products if they use the system? Sold!” Some embraced…

A Team Activity to Start a Design System — Teams can be awed by the scale and spread visible in finished systems like Material Design or Lightning Design System. Systems can be both incredibly broad and deep once fully formed, if they ever get that far. Faced with such scale, getting started can be quite daunting or avoided altogether. …

Kickoff a Design Library Effort by Engaging the Whole Team — The following activity is an abridged and lightly updated excerpt from Chapter 8: Discover of Modular Web Design, published in 2009 in the era of component and pattern libraries. The approach is just as relevant as today designers such as Charlotte Jackson formulate similar techniques to kickstart a library. Nothing…

Prioritize Processes Your Design System Needs — There’s a ton of “How Do I…?” questions to consider as you optimize your design system practice. Whether starting a design system practice from scratch or rebooting that practice, teams may put “everything we do” on the table for review. This is the perfect time to assess processes from a…