Design Systems London 2019 - Lily Dart
15 November 2019
- At Lloyds there are 350 designers, with 9000 developers. Getting folks to use the design system is a massive effort.
- “I tend to define the design system as the official story of how your organisation designs and build products” - Brad Frost
- Official Culture doesn’t necessarily mean Real Culture.
- What words would you describe your team culture when asked in an interview situation?
- What words would you describe your team culture when asked by a friend over dinner?
- Are the answers the same?
- Why does the difference matter in a Design System, because you won’t talk about the things you want to do but cannot because of the real culture.
- The gulf between reality and practice make it hard for Design Systems to land.
- When we lust over Design Systems it’s usually from companies that have the official and real culture overlapping a lot.
- “If the design system goes against the grain of the company, you are going to get unstuck.” – Shaun Bent
- “As we grew and matured as a design team, our newer design clashed with the older parts” – Emily Brick, Buzzfeed
- At Lloyds they started to build things within the existing culture of the company. It was more sharing UIKits on a server. They moved to Sketch Libraries but also found they were maintaining the components in 3 different locations.
- They wanted to provide detailed advice in using components, rather than creating the components in yet another format.
- How to deal with cultural mismatch:
- Make intentional compromises.
- Challenge the status quo.
- Pick your battles, and play the long game.