Quick notes about design system

I just attended a talk online this morning. The topic is “How Design Systems Define Business Success”. They invited two speakers — Hayley and Sampo — from Airbnb and Idean to share their experiences about designing a design system. The moderator — Talin is from Adobe XD. It’s very interesting to learn how they work on design system in their company, and compare to what we’re working on. Here are the notes if you’re interested in:

Q1. Why design system is so important?

1. Make sure we provide consistent experiences across different project.

2. Unlevel designer’s higher creativeness to focus on experiences, and decisions.

3. Make sure people use it correctly.

4. If other designed the same thing before, we don’t waste time on it

Q2. Most difficult things for implementing design system

Hayley

1. Design in different platforms, team schedule, and business location -> deliver it in same time

2. How to success: All the teams know the importance and value of design, and get the support

3. Solution: They can open up the prototype in build to see the real state of the process

Sampo

1. It depends on different clients to achieve harmonization

2. Company starts to know design is important, but they don’t know how to start

3. He’ll show how design system will help them to solve their problems. For example, every designer spent 5 minutes to design a button, it’ll waste lots of time.

4. Design system can be code UI library, Sketch library, XD library, persona -> also can only focus on one thing

Design system is a way of communicating values

Q3. Design system tools

1. Have collaborate design tool and internal tools, like a symbol set to sketch on whiteboard and quickly turn to prototype

2. Role play exercise: introduce the product to explain how it works for new comer

3. Main purpose: Deliver brand value

Q4. Accessibility

Hayley

1. Employees wave inclusive in their mind

2. Use accessibility tools to check if the design is passed or not

3. Design for low vision people to zoom in and quickly view

4. Test with people who have English as second language

5. Make sure you understand the icon’s culture and context

Sampo

1. Sometimes they have to challenge customer’s color brand some time to create accessible design system

Q5. Design system to designers

Hayley

1. Build more logic and documentation

2. Set up fresh eye to the design system

Sampo

1. System should be better to work together

2. Build the product in system and make it more efficient

Q6. How to define success?

Sampo

1. Build the community to keep growing

2. Maturing: managing the changes, team productivity, contribution you getting back

Hayley

1. How many people you’re affecting, customer success

Q7. Surprised thing you learned

Sampo

1. Tool, components, people involving and build the community for themselves

Hayley

1. Start to involve more people in the whole company in legal, pricing, writing

2. Designer can focus on more complex decisions

Q8. Communication strategy:

1. Announce in different channels

2. Also make sure you can gather feedback

Q9. How do you need a design system?

1. Take inventory, take 9 of your most popular products and put them together to compare

2. Think about what’s the desired experience? How we want to show up?