The RD Station redesign and the reality of building a Design System.
In 2019, RD Station began taking the first steps towards redesigning its products and building its Design System 2.0. We dreamed big, studied a lot, faced reality, learned quickly from our mistakes, and calibrated the target, and today, it makes us very proud to see what we’ve accomplished.
It was a long, tortuous path with some obstacles. We learned many lessons, and that's what we're going to share!
Structuring the Design Ops team
One of the first moves that RD Station made as soon as the redesign project began was to structure the Design Ops team (we called it Kondo).
RD Station’s Ops team includes designers, researchers, and UX writers. They are responsible for coordinating and organizing the Design Chapter, promoting internal training and awareness, raising UX debts, and designing the new Design System, the foundation for our new look.
One of Ops’ intrinsic roles, in addition to practical and technical day-to-day initiatives, is to engage the Chapter and align expectations regarding the project. Without that, we could create the most fantastic Design System, but it wouldn’t meet the needs of designers and therefore wouldn’t be used.
A Design System that is not regarded as useful by the Design and Development teams is bound to be just another tool that no one uses. And the result is a non-standard product and a lot of work for developing screens and features.
We always tried to bring the designers and engineers to work closely with us in creating the DS. Their different visions and needs were precious to us. This proximity was crucial in defining the redesign roadmap, prototyping and testing.
Getting to know (better) our customers and the challenges ahead
Due to a company’s strategic decision, we hired a specialized agency to help us work faster on this project. That’s when the Kondo team, still with only three people (Designer, UX Writer, and Product Manager), embraced another goal: to bridge the gap between designers and the contracted agency.
It took months of research, a lot of conversation, and interviews with customers. Both the agency and the design team had a very up-to-date view of the difficulties, concerns, and objectives of customers with our products. This phase was essential for us to “land” on the mission that lay ahead.
Early on, it was clear that it was essential to understand the brand for the Redesign’s success, how it positions itself, its personality, and how it relates to customers, how our entire ecosystem works. After all, a redesign doesn’t just affect the product. Indirectly, it will affect many areas like Branding, Marketing, and Customer Success, for example. Placing a third party at this same level of knowledge became a big challenge, and this was also a significant learning experience for the team.
This project’s level of responsibility and scale needed organization and planning to ensure maximum alignment between our team and the agency. As the project developed, we realized that our efforts should be focused on this planning.
The partnership with the agency was precious, as we had no idea of the challenge it would be to carry out a complete redesign. Still, from the moment the team became more influential, more confident, and “tied the house,” we were able to walk alone, and that was when we decided to take a step back and discontinue the partnership with the agency.
It was not an easy decision. We debated a lot internally about that decision. But today, the Kondo team is much bigger, with more responsibilities, challenges, and the RD Station redesign continues at full steam.
Tools and remote work
Without a shadow of a doubt, we could say that the redesign project and the Design System construction would’ve been a much more complex task if we didn’t have the tools we have at our disposal today.
Here at RD Station, we use Figma, Miro, and Zoom to work daily. These tools make it possible to run everything without almost any difficulties in communication and creation, as our team is split between the cities of Florianópolis and São Paulo, everyone working remotely.
Everything could be easily shared, and with the team’s engagement, it was like everyone was in the same room creating together. And often this happened, even remotely, for example, in the so-called “Redesign weeks,” when we elected a product feature to be remodeled. In a smaller group of designers, we carried out studies, raised problems, solutions, technical feasibility, prototyping, and, finally, tests and validations with clients.
This routine of “Redesign weeks” also involved a crucial ritual for us. We presented, discussed, and evaluated everything as a team. This worked out so well for us that it even improved the Chapter’s atmosphere. It brought the team together, made us get to know each other better, have more empathy, and even organized and accelerated the development of the DS and the project as a whole.
Another initiative we had, this time targeting the entire company, was to create a newsletter to publicize all the advances we were making. The redesign project was critical to everyone. Managing the anxiety and giving more insight into what was going on behind the scenes was fundamental — receiving each feedback after a newsletter was excellent and further confirmed the importance of the Design Chapter at RD Station.
Technology as a prioritization rule
One of the crucial points that drove us forward in the deliveries was the very clear definition of how far the redesign project would go. After that definition, we started to feel like we were getting somewhere.
One of the beacons we established for us was technology. It was out of our scope if the solutions bumped up too much in technology and took too much development time. An example of this would be creating new tools in the product: if that were the case, it would be for the future and not for now.
This definition helped us better prioritize what we would tackle, keep our feet on the ground, and have more accurate deadlines. The idea was to solve what we have available today and not predict future problems.
When you’re immersed in a redesign and full development of a Design System, it’s tempting to embrace the world and have thousands of ideas that would make the product even more unique, but that would possibly take a long time and demand a headcount much bigger.
The light at the end
Always keep an eye on what actually makes sense for YOUR product. It’s charming to want to make a very complete Design System and a grandiose redesign, but make sure that makes sense for your product. Stick to your reality, your use cases.
A Design System does not have to have every single component in the world but rather be helpful and practical for people who work with the product daily. It is not simplistic to close the scope and work as best as possible with what we have at our fingertips today. When we created this mindset, everything started to work faster in RD Station.
If your company’s reality is a bit like ours here, work with a lean scope, bring your team closer — make everyone buy the idea and get excited about it — do your best with the deadline that you have and never forget to share!
