How I created and managed Design System for my team
What is Design System?
It’s a method used by all major IT companies to translate a consistent experience and visual language across a product when working on different touch-points. It helps to make design output better and faster. The purpose of design systems to achieve pace and consistency in designs and deliver matured product.
Design systems are essentially collections of guidelines,
information, rules and reusable components to design and develop
consistent products faster and better.
When we were working on the design process, we realised there will be a lot of documents, templates and libraries which we will have to maintain and update. And that is an ongoing process. On the other side, our team was working on new design principles, templates and asset libraries to bring consistency among all product designs.
Our Design System not only deals with design products but also the design process. It helps designers to learn, create and collaborate design knowledge and encourage them to follow Design Process.
Which tools we are using?
Store
To share files and documents with other teams across the organization, I used MS SharePoint site. With the new MS 365 solution creating a custom team site is easy. I made a simple folder structure as per document types and stored files in separate folders of platforms and disciplines.
Communicate
MS Teams was used as a communication tool. Creating multiple groups, channels, incorporating other apps like excel, planner helped us to assign and track task status. SharePoint site and MS Teams are connected to each other, which make group discussions, video/audio conferencing and file sharing easy.
Share
Adobe Creative Cloud is the best way to create, maintain and share libraries. All the designers and creative professional use Adobe tools for their day to day work. I created some libraries and explained the process to my colleagues to contribute to the system.
System Structure
Design System majorly consists of guidelines, templates and libraries. The Design System which I working on was not only deal with design production but also design process. Below is the structure which we were following to create and maintain a design system for our team.
Process Part
Design Part
Access
Our Devices Design team started working on this design system but our plan was to share all the knowledge, resources and responsibilities with other internal team members as well. We wanted to shift this system management from centralised to distributed type to accumulate maximum knowledge from experts and make them also valuable contributor. The end goal is to achieve pace, consistency and maturity in design work.
UX of UX Designer
The ultimate motto of this Design System is to design a better experience for designers. When any designer joins the team, right from the start designer should be well informed about the team, working style and design principles. When the designer starts working on any task, he/she should be equipped with all the correct updated resources. And in the end, the designer should be able to use his/her knowledge/learnings to make the system better and better every day.
The ideal Design System will encourage designers to follow the process. It will allow designers to LEARN, CREATE and COLLABORATE, which help them to design better experience and not just interface.
Design System for an organisation
I presented my idea of the design system for Jio in Design Talk, which is a part of our community of practice initiative for internal design teams. Things which we were doing for our team, were practically possible considering the situation and tools which every team using across the organisation. People liked the concept, they also realised the importance and benefits of such a mechanism.
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