“Inclusive” Design Systems
Design systems are becoming increasingly popular in the industry with each passing day. While being part of the design system team may seem glamorous from the outside, it entails its own set of responsibilities, including handling numerous challenges, satisfying various teams within your organisation (i.e., design system users), and often engaging in firefighting. However, it’s crucial to ensure that your users feel included throughout the process. This is heavily influenced by team culture, and if you’re fortunate enough to be part of a team that recognises the importance of a central design system, consider yourself lucky!
A design system functions as a product with its own user base, much like any other product. However, the distinction lies in the fact that its actual users are internal to your organisation. Your objective is to enhance their productivity, efficiency, and address recurring issues they encounter in each project iteration, thus optimising their time investment. Additionally, a well-designed system also positively impacts external end users by ensuring a consistent, high-quality experience across all products, leading to increased satisfaction and engagement.
Making everyone feel inclusive 🤝
In a design systems team, inclusivity in the design process is vital. It brings diverse perspectives, fostering innovation and user-friendly designs while ensuring stakeholder buy-in and improving collaboration. Inclusivity leads to higher quality outcomes, empowers team members, and ensures the design system aligns with user needs.
Envision managing a team exceeding 50 individuals — ensuring everyone feels included presents a significant challenge. Establishing personal connections with each team member to promote your product becomes nearly unfeasible. Therefore, alternative strategies must be devised. It’s essential to invest time in identifying early adopters within each business unit or team. These are the people who use new products or technologies before others do. As they will play a vital role in guiding others toward adopting the product. Not only this, these people will also help you in providing feedback from a whole spectrum of products across the organisation. Basically, this is a prime opportunity to showcase the value we offer and turn these users into loyal advocates.
Gather up these users and give them a catchy name that everyone on the team would love to join. For us, our design system is called Blade, so we dubbed them the Blade Advocates!
They’ll not only help promote our system in their own teams but also feel like part of the squad. While these groups are super helpful from designing-side, you can also create a similar crew on the dev side to benefit from both design and development perspectives. For this blog, we’ll focus on the design side of things.
To streamline collaboration, ensure you create a dedicated handle for this group on Slack, email, and other communication platforms.
Moderating a Design Advocate Group
Ensuring effective moderation of the advocate group is essential. As a design system designer, it’s crucial to prepare sessions in advance, so that you can make best out of this session where you have bunch of creative minds. Here are key considerations when soliciting feedback from the advocate group:
- Collaborate with a colleague: Instead of conducting the session alone, invite a colleague to join you. They can assist in noting down key points throughout the session.
- Schedule sessions in advance: Send a calendar invite with the agenda well in advance prior to the session. Utilise multiple communication channels (such as slack, email, etc.) for reminders.
- Provide context at the start: Begin the session by reiterating the agenda and setting the context so that all participants understand the session’s objectives.
- Emphasise audit and research: When reviewing a component, prioritise discussing the insights and findings along with their rationale before showcasing the final output. This approach helps participants grasp the reasoning behind decisions.
- Reserve questions for the end: Conclude your presentation or case study before opening up for questions. Meanwhile, engage a colleague from the DS team to address questions asynchronously via chat.
- Recap the discussion: After concluding the call, summarise the key points discussed and distribute minutes of meeting (MoM) to ensure alignment among all participants.
Responsibilities of the Design Advocates
When establishing this group, it’s important to establish clear expectations and remain mindful of what we anticipate from it. Typically, we anticipate feedback in the following areas:
- Identification of potential use-cases overlooked in the audit
- Anticipation of upcoming use-cases
- General feedback on UX and UI aspects
- Consensus on general queries such as design language and flexibility
- Providing education to their teams from the perspective of the DS
After receiving feedback from the advocates, it’s crucial for a DS designer to incorporate the feedback and present the final proposal along with the rationale. This can also be achieved asynchronously, which is vital in fostering a sense of inclusivity throughout the entire process.
Nuances of working with Advocates
The essential skill I’ve acquired over time is patience, crucial for fostering positive relationships. Building rapport with others doesn’t happen overnight; it often takes months or even years of patience and understanding.
- Prioritise education: When collaborating with a team new to the Design System (DS), it’s important to recognise that there’s a learning curve involved. Explaining its workings and processes can be challenging. It’s essential to invest time in familiarising them with your design process and decision-making for components. Conducting workshops and offering office hours can be highly beneficial. Patience is key in this endeavour.
- Focus on alignment: Getting everyone to agree on everything isn’t always doable. Some folks are pretty stuck in their ways. When that happens, just acknowledge where they’re coming from, circle back to the talks, and try to see things from their angle. Once you’ve got their perspective, it’s easier to suggest different ideas or find solutions that work for everyone.
- Formalise agreements in writing: Through experience, I’ve come to realise the importance of documenting decisions. While verbal discussions are valuable, formalising agreements in writing is crucial. Design is subjective and evolves over time. Therefore, ensuring every alignment decision is documented is imperative.
- Timely recognition for advocates: Advocates require motivation, making it crucial to promptly reward top advocates with exciting incentives such as merchandise, shoutouts, or gift cards. This fosters loyalty to your initiative and yields long-term benefits.
- Foster contributions: Encouraging advocate partners to contribute even the smallest components to the system is essential for its overall development. The design system isn’t solely one team effort; it’s built with user collaboration. By contributing, advocates become more invested in promoting the product within their respective teams.
Ending Thoughts!
It’s crucial to start with a strong advocate team to ensure that no one in the company sees you as an outsider! These advocates are your top cheerleaders, and building a solid bond with them is key. They play a pivotal role in the entire design system journey.
Making the design process inclusive encourages people to adopt the system naturally, without the need for constant chasing. When individuals feel involved in decision-making, they become champions of the system, which in turn ensures that the design system truly meets the needs of its end users. By embracing this approach, you avoid missing important use cases that these advocates bring to the table. Working together as a cohesive team is essential, especially as part of the central crew, because you want everyone on board since they’re all using your product and service.
