A huge part of the design system involves communicating our designs and intent to the team of developers. Here's how we scaled the design team while onboarding new members and being an advocate for the system!
Moving towards atomic design system
While moving from an older file system to a newer one, I took the responsibility to rebuild how the design system was setup based on the Atomic design structure. Adopting a new structure meant creating components from scratch, collaborating and communicating intent to larger teams, and closely monitoring the adoption and usage.
A few more things that I initiated and led for features used by 100,000+ users-
Designed custom components for complex features
Created & improved colors, typography, spacing, and loader styles
Created theme-able tokens and dark mode
Advocating for design system
Building esign system involves communicating our designs and intent to our outstanding team of developers. Along with giving them new updates on the design system, we also focused on developing relationships and rapport for seamless collaboration by-
Conducted 2 anonymous surveys which resulted in 80% improvement from previous handoff process
Brought out key problems through cross-collaboration vs one way updates
Plugin support, resource sharing and
Creating custom learning material, handoff guidelines and nomenclature to encourage consistent usage among internal teams
Learning and evolving
The internal surveys brought another interesting insight - how do we make sure our designs are translated perfectly into the developed version?
Our team ran a brainstorming session and included an audit and testing cycle after every design sprint. Most of the large companies had a similar process; it was interesting to come up with our own method through trial and error after a year of running sprints within the small teams.
