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

  • Design systems only work if they provide value to product teams

  • DS teams need product ideas and direction from its users

  • The strength of the community around the DS is a critical to its success

  • In a large scale company its difficult to grow DS influence and adoption

Start with people

  • 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

How to kill collaboration

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

Connect to Align

Alignment is a key but its difficult to achieve

  • Build connections, teams often don't have your wide perspective

  • Bring folks together to review alignment opportunities

  • Use their input to guide your system alignment 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

Liaisons - Reaching key teams

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

  • Each designer can focus on a section of the wider org - choose s

  • They become first line of connection between product team and the system team

  • They can share learnings both directions, to benefit all

  • Face time in meetings/reviews/critiques builds trust and connections

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

Customer support

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

My part

  • 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 🎉

Reflections

Close connections

  • Difficult to add new processes expectations for product feature teams

  • Used higher level goals to promote improvements to process

  • Partnering with inclusive design initiatives, employee resource group

  • Champions program spread the knowledge and discussion beyond our small teams

Read my full article:

Blog post cover image

Fostering Collaborative Design Systems

Oct 11, 2023

Blog post cover image

Fostering Collaborative Design Systems

Oct 11, 2023

Let's connect :)

I can share more about this project when we meet.

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Additional case studies

Project Thumbnail

Moving Fast: PayPal UI 4

Exectutive Rush to revise the DS

Design Systems
Project Thumbnail

Evolution: PayPal UI 0-3

New system from birth to maturity

Design Systems

Accessible Practices

Adding skill to the design org

Inclusion