Products - Craig Jamieson

What is a design system?

A design system is a living ecosystem that serves the teams working on deploying products. As a central repository, it can be a combination of a coded components, design guides, brand assets and rules of engagement. This is usually an independent project run by a dedicated team who maintain the overall repository, code all the components, deploy updates and create all the assets for consumption by the teams across an organization.

The following are some of the most common categories within a design system.

Styleguide Commonly referred to as a living style guide is a visual reference of all the design assets that make up a brand and it’s supporting media and include things like colour, type, layout and other assets to help the design team consistently utilize the brand assets. This is constantly growing as more and more assets are added and the brand evolves.

Visual Language The brand will share the visual assets and their usage to best communicate effectively across media and contain a variety of produced assets such as video, icons, illustrations, and photography.

Design Language Every great design starts with a definition of the values and the standards to which a design effectively comes together and communicates seamlessly across multiple media. Principles are shared to help teams better understand why decisions were made and how best to apply them.

Pattern Library A coded repository of atomic-like assets for developers to easily consume to reduce the amount of churn and repeated assets that need to align across a project and function in a consistent way. This is usually html and css and some basic javascript. It can be, but not necessarily include complicated coded assets such as angularJS, jQuery and React, as technology changes so quickly code might be redundant before going live. The coded assets are both visual, functional and can be executable.

Voice & Tone Effective content and communication requires a brands voice and tone, while also including guidelines on how to effectively add content to communicate consistently across media.

Brand Guidelines Brand assets can be downloaded and appropriate guidelines shared to ensure consistent brand usage and avoid dilution of the brand and incorrect deployment creating confusion when developing brand assets.

Added to that, guidelines, legal documentation, how to contribute, get support and update logs are essential to maintaining a design system.

I hope you found this very basic guideline useful. Design systems are ever increasing in their detail and functionality and I’m sure in the future I will explain in more detail all the new features you can add and why you would need them. Whether you’re a designer, a developer or running teams and projects, a design system has to be the best way to create a consistent product, increase productivity and align your teams to your companies product vision.

System design: Block builders

In a big organization, there are a lot of moving parts across various departments and projects and when the goal is to create a single design language, keeping a consistent design can become almost impossible. My strategy for this was to develop a core design team who would be responsible for designing the individual components of our design system which could then be deployed and consumed by designers who worked within project teams. This was met with a huge amount of resistance as people seem to think that having bums in seats within projects would speed things up and deadlines would be achieved. However, the goal is to have a consistent design and building up a living style guide would provide us with a platform that all teams could understand and consume the required components in which to apply to their designs. Ultimately project teams should be more focused on other priorities like functionality, better user experiences and align all projects into the specific channels that will deliver these to the people who will use them.

In order for me to explain this over and over again, to which I have mildly had some success, I have managed to create the analogy that this core design are busy creating the system, which if I get my way, will consist of pairing up designers with developers so they can dev these components and test, break and animate them before committing them or rolling out several static designs, is call these my Lego block builders. Their responsibility is to make the Lego blocks which the Lego builders will consume to make the Lego models. There is a very generic list of components almost every project may consume from (atoms), there’s how you piece these components together (molecules) and then there’s the way they work together (organisms). The Lego builders consume this within their various projects and should they need a specific block that does not exist, it is their responsibility to identify it and bring. it to the core design team who will then work with them to create the blocks and how they work together to deliver on the projects needs, feeding back into the system for all other Lego builders to consume. I have borrowed some language from Atomic design principles, and we have probably all played with Lego, so this should be language most people can understand.

I am often told that this is not agile and this is creating silos etc. Maybe, but it’s necessary if you want to have a single look-and-feel that represents the brand consistently. Spreading the design out across multiple teams, on multiple projects, in various buildings would simply not work. While I could move across all teams and keep alignment, the task is too great and much easier to control by giving out a set of guidelines for teams to follow. It’s a subject for another post, but living style guides and designs systems are necessary and utilised by most big organisations who want to create seamless experiences for their customers, but throwing tons of resources won’t develop this any more successfully than rather putting a core team together who work with each other to solve the visual design challenges and deploy them into the style guide and then iterate accordingly. I think the challenge is to identify the brick builders from the Lego designers who consume the bricks and make sure that there is still enough design challenges for everyone to be inspired no matter which role they are best suited. The other is getting people to understand the vision and hopefuly make them understand that in order to be consistent and speed up the design process, a small core team is the most practical solution I can think of.

Why I subscribe to UX, but don’t call myself a UX Designer

Quite often when my friends introduce me to new people, they are unsure how best to introduce me, as explaining what I do is challenging, in truth, even for myself. But more often than not of late, I get introduced as a user experience designer, big thanks to my friends who always pop in “one the of the best …”, kudos! They call me this because I often talk about user experience as part of how I think about solving problems, and a practice I have gotten comfortable with, as I typed that I rolled my eyes, but I reluctantly use user experience as part of my thinking.

For me it’s all kinda simple, I design useful stuff that people simply love. The industry buzz word is user experience and it’s opened up an entirely new category of the team member in product teams and the like, who play not only a huge part in the success of a product etc, but they have huge clout!

I really believe that everyone is a user experience designer, as we are all responsible for the experience of the end user. But then that’s like saying everyone’s a designer because we all solve problems. Well, it’s how you solve those problems that define who we are and what we do.

Of course, given my constant attention I give to better experiences for users, or more specifically people, I am more broadly understood as being a user experience designer. But I am not. The guys that stand out for me as user experience designers might not be thinking on a whole other level as me, but they apply themselves on a level, I simply am not comfortable doing.

The thing that makes someone, specifically a user experience designer, is not purely how they think or the methodology they practice, but the tasks they do, such as user research, creating personas and hypothesis etc. There are lists of things user experience designers do, that I can do, that I enjoy hearing about, that I understand and I include in my decision making, but I simply don’t like to do myself.

I have been designing for digital channels and making stuff for nearly two decades and there are many I do well, but I am well aware that what I am when you strip away any fancy titles I might have received or called myself in order to qualify myself, is simply a designer. Where I practice my design is a whole other conversation. But what I am not, is a user experience designer, I simply subscribe to thinking and best practice and apply it to my work.

If only I could find a better handle for my social platforms, as I cringe that I still use @digiguru with all the misconceptions and remarks that name refers to, both the reference to digital, despite most of the work I have done has been in this gray area of what some people call digital and to sitting cross-legged in the lotus position somewhere on top of a mountain in the Himalayas.

The only thing that’s constant, is change

In the earlier years of my career, I did much smaller projects. Microsites, personal sites, presentations etc. Then things got bigger, campaign sites, platforms, e-commerce sites and so on. Now days, I am very much interested in building product eco-systems, and I like to work on the same project for longer periods of time, by constantly iterating and improving things. I love how platforms like Medium, Pinterest and the like are always evolving the smallest details and constantly improving on their designs.

I could never have imagined that when I began my career, I was constantly about new things, but now the new thing, is a small detail that makes for a better experience for users. What I find amusing is that we used to redesign, and then make a big deal about it. But now we keep changing things, subtly as if no one will really notice, the site just kinda feels better. As they say, the only thing that is constant, is change.