Design Systems at Scale: An Introduction

Introducing a series that uncovers how to scale a design system and drive its adoption.

By Alex Nicholls, Director of Design Technology, Workday

Many companies these days are in the process of creating and adopting their own “design system.” While this is a common buzz word in the design industry right now, many people either don’t understand the fundamentals of design systems, or they don’t know how to use these to their full potential. The best design systems are an ever evolving ecosystem — not just a set of components and colors, but a library of guidelines and a way of thinking. And it doesn’t stop there: the advantages that can be achieved by extending your system’s reach above and beyond your design teams are endless. Prepare yourself to learn how and why to scale your own design system, with an inside look at how Workday Design has overcome the challenges that come with this process.

While a design system usually starts its life as a file full of UI components for designers to use, calling this your “design system” is like taking some water and hops and calling it beer 🍺. The first step to turning your components into a real design system, is to utilize tools that make those component designs easier to manage and use in a more atomic way. Some examples of these are Sketch Libraries, Lingo, Abstract, and Git (did I just say Git? 😱). But what happens when you need to begin sharing those components outside the team who created them? Design principles and guidelines are a requirement if you want your broader team to create consistent and enjoyable user experiences. Now what happens when you want to share your design system beyond your design team? What if you want to share it with the world?

We recently tackled this challenge as we announced our Workday Canvas Design System. This post kicks off a series about how to scale a design system and drive its adoption. You’ll also get a look at the tools and resources we provide to our organization to foster a strong design mentality. The series will cover the following topics:

1. Building a Design System for Scale
2. Technology and Tools for Design Systems
3. Design Documentation at Scale: Crowdsourcing Content
4. Innovation with Design Systems: The Next Frontier

The Sneak Preview

Part 1: Building a Design System for Scale

Let’s explore the impact and value that sharing your design system with a larger audience can add and how you can encourage this growth within your own organization. When rolling out a product design system, it should be shared outwards in phases that are tied to specific audiences. The system itself will grow, adapt, and improve as it makes its way from the internal design team, to other design teams throughout the company, then on to project managers and developers. These teams will experience significant convenience and consistency as they integrate the design system into their workflow. While many companies stop there, sharing with the remainder of your company (executives, salespeople, etc.) can really encourage design thinking in all areas of the business. Lastly, you should be aiming to share your battle-tested design system publicly in order to promote your company’s focus on design, improve sales, and empower your hiring process.

Part 2: Technology and Tools for Design Systems

In the past, there was a divide between design and development. Today, they’re more aligned than ever. We’re seeing more designers take up coding, and there’s a steady increase of tooling to help with design delivery. From HTML, CSS, and Javascript UI-kits to optimization pipelines for visual assets, technology can make an immense impact on design system deployment.

To help designers, developers, and product managers leverage the power of the Workday Canvas Design System we created the Workday Design site. This serves as the home for our component documentation, content style guides, resources and much more. Releasing a design site added legitimacy and it quickly became a resource for creators across Workday. Since its introduction, we’ve seen its usage skyrocket and we are constantly working to improve and add more content. It’s often overlooked how internally built technology like this can help your design org, so expect a behind the scenes look at how our design operations team — an extremely talented group of design and development hybrid unicorns 🦄 — built out our design site.

Part 3: Design Documentation at Scale: Crowdsourcing Content

Once you have the technical foundation of your design system in place, it’s all about making your design documentation scalable by crowd-sourcing content from people throughout your design organization. We have modeled the content of our design site to be extremely flexible, making restructuring or reorganization of content easy as our documentation grows. We have also focused significant effort on providing powerful, yet simple tools to edit content that reduces the barrier of entry for designers and design focused individuals. Other teams can also use our scalable site architecture to gracefully share documentation in different contexts. For example, our Workday Cloud Platform documentation website (a platform for building integrations on top of Workday using its data and services) can easily pull in any of the Workday Canvas Design System documentation using this architecture.

Part 4: Innovation with Design Systems: The Next Frontier
Creating a design system that’s ready for scale is a massive undertaking and your job is never finished. It’s not for the faint of heart, but it’s completely worth it in the end. The advantages you’ll uncover from extending your system’s reach above and beyond your design teams will continue to surprise you. It will be a team effort, but your team will need strong direction and guidance. This series aims to equip you with the knowledge to provide just that.

With the scale and influence of a mature design system (especially in a company and product as large as Workday) it may always feel like you’re standing at the edge of a chasm, taking a deep breath before your next leap. We like to see it as a trail of baby steps leading to the next frontier. At Workday, we will continue to innovate, striving to encourage design thinking across our business and improve our creators’ workflows. Prepare yourself for an inside look at how Workday Design conquered these challenges (though we’re never done iterating), and scaled our Workday Canvas Design System for the masses. Learn from our successes and mistakes, and you’ll be ready to begin scaling your own design system throughout your company and beyond. We have many plans we’d like to share for the future of our design system, our design site, and our presence in the design community. We encourage you to make the same steps towards design greatness, and would love for you to share your experience with us. I look forward to seeing what you create.

Stay tuned for next installment in the series, Building a Design System for Scale, and start scaling your design system to its true potential.