Peter Phinney

We were a small team creating a design system, defining stylistic elements (“look & feel”) and provides a collection of reusable HTML and CSS components to build consistent, accessible, enterprise-grade web-based applications. Doing this in an organization from the ground up, no mandate. How are we going to get folks to join and be apart of this effort?

I had done this in a past life and knew it would work, as we had started on this much earlier. Designers were already working with some of the teams. They were already building relationships, we knew all our stakeholders and we had been testing out the design system with them.

We setup some bi-weekly meetings with some of the teams that showed interest and passion for what we were doing and began a dialog around. What challenges were they having. How could we solve a design issue or an implementation issue. What did the not like and what did they want to see from a design system. We asked them to bring back design ideas to evaluate if they could be more broadly adopted across various products to become a part of the design system other products could use.

We got to a point with the design system and the number of teams taking up the design we needed a more structured way in which to encourage the implementation.

We brought the teams together, asked them to set a roadmap and timeline evaluate their product to a specific version of the design system. We then set a five point scale to be used to evaluate each of the specific areas of the design system. Members of the design and product teams would evaluate the alignment of the product, distributing the workload and leveling the evaluation bias. The evaluation would be done through a survey provided to complete the evaluation.

It should be mentioned that there were many concerns with putting measurement on the products. We made sure this was a measure of adoption to a specific version for their product. The measure was designed not to be punitive. Only to evaluate areas worked on by the product team in a specific time period to align to a specific version of the design system.

The design system we created supports over 20 products. We build a design and development community that continues to meet on a weekly basis. There are forums for issues for design and development. There is a news letter on releases. There are other non-work fun activities that we invite the community to be a part of. I will say the process of setting this up to several years to make happen. It was a long and rewarding road.