Portfolio
Design System

My role as Design System Lead at Interactive Investor spanned the management and evolution of the Design System from V1 to V2, implementation of new ways of working, and the building of a dedicated Design System team to handle the creation and maintenance of Design System assets.

When I started, the Figma Design System was in poor shape, with components built years ago not benefitting from recent Figma features to streamline them. This resulted in many more variants than necessary and pain maintaining the library.

Component pages had poor or no documentation, and were used as work-in-progress files by the whole team, with anyone being able to contribute or edit assets. There was also no dedicated team responsible for maintaining Storybook to keep it in line with Figma.

This led to a growing level of disparity between Design and Development, as Figma asset updates were rarely reflected in their coded counterparts, resulting in friction between Design and Development on the single source of truth.

It was also clear that designers were struggling to navigate the Design System, and this resulted in low adoption, excessive questions, and uncertainty over the contents of the system.

When designers eventually did find what they wanted, the component either had no documentation, little documentation, or generic documentation copied from the web.

It was clear that due to no dedicated management of the Design System, there was no-one in charge of assessing what improvements could be made to the system.

To change this, I set multiple touchpoints for the team to provide feedback. These ranged from weekly Design System Office Hours sessions, to regular workshops to help designers use assets correctly, and quarterly retros for more detailed analysis on ways to make the Design System work for the people using it.

The main part of my role was building the new Design System from scratch. A clean start, not hindered by the fact that the team were using V1 was the best approach, allowing me to build it in a secure, protected environment, conduct tests to improve component builds, and provide assets to the Design System Engineers to build before releasing them for consumption.

As part of my role, and due to my strong background in UI Design, I was tasked with upskilling the team to ensure they used Figma to its full capacity, as well as keeping the team informed about the latest updates and features.

A dedicated Design System team would enable the teams consuming the Design System to focus on implementation rather than struggling to add and maintain Storybook themselves.

To ensure that we didn’t go back to the previous way of working where anyone could add components to the Design System, I implemented a request workflow.

This helped establish the expectation that any new addition needed true rationale, and had to solve a purpose not already solved by existing Design System assets.

The results of a closer relationship with the Design System users, simplification of the structure and composition of the Design System and its assets, and the building of a dedicated Design System team to take the management of the Design System away from the collective.