Working with friends - Collaborative Strategies

Learning how to build a community around our work

Building a new practice at PayPal

I started learning about accessibility and working closely with our accessibility staff as a side project
Eventually it became fully supported and we made it an essential part of our process

The challenge

Instead of starting with the pixels, start with the people - they are what makes the design system work
Find a few eager collaborators to work with, build momentum
Those who contribute will feel more ownership and help adopt the system
Map out your community levels from simply aware, to active user, to contributor, to ambassador
Show care for their success, provide custom support to build trust

The small accessibility team was focused on training the engineering org and help them repair known issues
Our DS team was focused on building our system and had few interactions about accessibility, primarily on implementation
Accessibility team wanted to reach designers - our Design System team was a great conduit to the wider UX org
The wider UX org was not trained for accessibility design

Its easier to kill collaboration in a design system than keep it alive

Mistreat your customers (users of the system)
- Make it difficult to use the system
- Reject any feedback or requests, be as rigid as possible
- Don't communicate - about your process, goals, measurements
Be Controlling
- Block any innovation or experimentation
- Be the bad cop - design police controlling all the design work

Partnering with my teammate and app designers we explored ways to better support native iOS/Android system settings for text size.

Previous app version ignored OS text resizing - not accessible
Designed a proportional scale to balance hierarchy of the max size (200%) across the type ramp
Worked with engineers to test and refine sizes
Collaborated with app designers to make layouts responsive to large text sizes

Alignment is a key but its difficult to achieve

Partnering with my teammate and app designers we explored ways to better support native iOS/Android system settings for text size.

Previous app version ignored OS text resizing - not accessible
Designed a proportional scale to balance hierarchy of the max size (200%) across the type ramp
Worked with engineers to test and refine sizes
Collaborated with app designers to make layouts responsive to large text sizes

As the team scales, your DS staff can become liaisons to product groups

Partnering with my teammate and app designers we explored ways to better support native iOS/Android system settings for text size.

Previous app version ignored OS text resizing - not accessible
Designed a proportional scale to balance hierarchy of the max size (200%) across the type ramp
Worked with engineers to test and refine sizes
Collaborated with app designers to make layouts responsive to large text sizes

Don't underestimate the dirty work

Be consistent and attentive to the customer service side of the design system, making the system and its artifacts is only half the job of a DS team
Office hours let your DS customers bring questions and suggestions to you. Make them fun and collaborative
Comm channels (Slack/Teams/chat) can be great forums for sharing out to your customers, answering common questions, and leading them back to office hours
Support is a great way to find the needs of your users, influence your roadmap and fix bugs quickly

Partnering with my teammate and app designers we explored ways to better support native iOS/Android system settings for text size.

Previous app version ignored OS text resizing - not accessible
Designed a proportional scale to balance hierarchy of the max size (200%) across the type ramp
Worked with engineers to test and refine sizes
Collaborated with app designers to make layouts responsive to large text sizes

I established new designer onboarding to introduce folks to our system and how to partcipate in evolving it
I ran many office hour sessions to provide support to the community
I was the front line support on our busy DS slack channels (both design and engineering) to answer DS questions and connect teams to collaborate on new topics
I contributed to the UX org's culture committee to build a stronger community through the transition to remote work, using virtual social events, and fun engaging challenges in org channels
I created a conference talk on the topic for GOV.UK Design System Day 🎉