Maintain a high-level of creativity as a Product Designer in a large organization.
Before joining Doctolib as a Product Designer, I’ve worked as a Creative Director & Art Director in agencies. Having to work for different industries, clients & brands challenges your creativity on a day-to-day basis.
The first thing that surprised me at Doctolib is how complete was our Design system (Oxygen), joining one of the biggest product design teams in Europe with a dedicated Design Ops team.
While having such a complete and effective Design System is a perfect approach for ensuring consistency and scalability, having to use the same system pushes you to find new ways to be creative.
The role of Oxygen Design System
A design system is a collection of reusable components, guided by clear standards, that can be assembled together to build any number of applications.
Design system is meant to be a coherent and scalable experience. it’s the primary tool used by product designers. Consistency is key, and the same design system needs to be used everywhere to create consistency and make the product look unite.
To better understand this concept, let’s look at it through the lens of a Lego construction set. A design system is like the instruction manual that comes with a Lego set. It provides the user with the necessary steps to construct a specific design. The end result is a fully constructed product that looks the same as what is depicted in the manual.
This said, it looks like we’re just pulling pre-created components together, which doesn’t involve being creative, isn’t it?
The paths of creativity with a design system
While you could think that it brings limitations and boundaries, there are several ways to be highly-creative when using such a design system.
#1 Less craft? More thinking!
The relationship between a design system and user interfaces is symbiotic. Our design system provides a set of predefined UI components and guidelines that ensure visual and functional consistency across an application.
As most of Design systems, Oxygen is built on Atomic Design. It enableq teams to create UI elements at various levels of complexity and assemble them like building blocks, ensuring efficiency and flexibility in the design process.
While it gives you every atoms and molecules to work with, it’ll free up valuable time for thinking, iterating, and being creative.
You won’t have to reinvent the wheel for every new project or screen. This saves time by eliminating the need to create and style components from scratch.
This efficiency enables us to allocate more time to critical thinking, problem-solving, and iterating on the user experience.
We’re also able to iterate faster. This agility allows for faster exploration of alternative design solutions, enabling designers to experiment, gather feedback, and refine their ideas more efficiently.
All these time-saving aspects allow us to devote more energy to thinking critically, exploring new concepts, iterating on designs, and injecting their creative flair into the product.
#2 Behavioural design : another creative dimension.
Behavioral design involves understanding human psychology and behavior to create products that encourage desired actions or behaviors.
Gathering knowledge on these principles makes you realise how users think, make decisions, and interact with products.
Knowing them will make you uncover insights that spark creative ideas. Users’ motivations, biases, and heuristics allow you to be more creative, explore strategies, interactions, and visual elements that capture users’ attention and motivate them to take specific actions (while avoiding dark patterns).
For exemple, I created Behavioral cards on our Design System Toolbox for our Designers to use and include on their Figma’s, uncovering the main UX principle and helping them think about new design ways or iterations.
#3 A Design System is not set in stone. How can you make it evolve?
As a product designer, you have the opportunity to contribute to the design system by identifying areas where it can be improved and suggesting new components or improvements that can enhance the user experience.
Knowing that, our Design Ops teams created specific rituals for Product Designers to be involved:
- Oxygen Updates, that brings discussion on new components, updates designers, get feedbacks.
- Oxygen Open Hours, where designers can ask any questions, bring new topics to the Ops team or seeks helps creating components
- OUP (Oxygen Updates Proposals): forms that allows designers to ask for new components, improvements, modifications, etc…
By doing so, you not only contribute to the overall success of the product but also showcase your creativity and problem-solving skills. It’s important to remember that the design system can always be improved, so don’t be afraid to voice your ideas and suggestions.
For example, I had a use case where we needed to bulk edit several rows in a table, and be able to perform several actions. We didn’t have a specific component for that. After interviewing several designers, I realised that using a dedicated floating toolbar would be a great solution not only for my use case, but several others across our products.
We spent some time creating an agnostic component with the Design Ops team, to be sure that it would be useful for others and well integrated inour products.
Your contributions can make a significant impact on the overall success of the product and the satisfaction of its users.
#4 The 80/20 approach: accept UI variations that respect the whole experience
As our Design Ops leader said:
“there will always be use cases in which the Design System can’t be fully applied, and needs to be tweaked.”
(10 lessons I learned owning on a Design System for 30+ Product Designers and 200+ Developers)
Indeed, it’s important to recognize that Design System components aren’t always the answer to every design problem that arises. When faced with a particularly complex or unique challenge, it may be necessary to step outside the boundaries of your design system and come up with a more customized solution.
By knowing the limitations and boundaries of your design system, you can better understand when it’s appropriate to deviate from it and explore alternative solutions that can ultimately enhance the overall user experience. That’s why allowing 20% of “open time” for designers to create, innovate and create something truly unique without sacrificing usability or cohesiveness.
For example, we needed to rework a flow displaying a pricing choice at some point. We designed a new interface that doesn’t exactly follow the design System guidelines but improves the UX for users (using Default effect).
To summarize…
Overall, maintaining creativity as a product designer in a large organization requires a balance of consistency and creativity. It’s about finding ways to work with the design system while still pushing the boundaries to create unique and engaging user interfaces that enhance the user experience.
To finish with the Lego analogy, think of it as creating enough variation to make all your constructions relevant without using the exact same instruction manual. As a product designer, you are not just a builder at the end of the day, but also a notice creator.
Remember, creativity flourishes when you embrace the design system as a starting point and use it as a tool to enable your innovative thinking.
By combining your unique perspective, creativity, and the system’s foundation, you can create outstanding and cohesive user experiences.
Thanks to Raphaël, Paméla Oliva Gil and Jérôme Benoit forn their inputs.
Thanks Yutian Zhou for the cover illustration.
And thanks to the great doctolib team !
