Design Systems London 2019 - Shaun Bent
15 November 2019
- 2006 - No designers, they made mock-ups in MS Paint.
- 2008 - Spotify released on the desktop
- The different platforms Spotify was on were owned by different teams for those platforms
- In 2013 Spotify decided to align all things to a single brand to address the fragmentation. It was when it started to look like the dark themed application we see today.
- After the Design System for the new consistency was created the team creating it was disbanded.
- In 2015 Spotify tweaked the design, including their green. With the previous team disbanded they needed to start again with GLUE. The Spotify Design System.
- Two challenges with GLUE.
- Autonomy, with ‘The Spotify Model’. Having a single team created a bottleneck. One team owned the UI - teams broke away, creating their own components
- Spotify is everywhere, Spotify changed direction to being more than just an application. Which leads to 45 individual experiences.
- The GLUE. approach was never going to scale across 45 platforms.
- The GLUE. had become unstuck - the decision was to close down the team. The team was disbanded but the Design System had continued usage.
- A team was created to solve these new problems. Creating the DLS (Design Language System).
- Design Tokens to the rescue! Allowed the language to go to the 45 platforms. Allowed them to make small changes that would get applied to all projects.
- Client facing applications started to have its own Design System being created - Tape. It had massive, grassroots adoptions. Tape was open, GLUE. was closed.
- As it was open - Tape has become the de facto Design System for Spotify.
- Now Spotify has 3 official design systems. But, through research they found 22 (and counting) independent Design Systems being used across Spotify.
- Having tried Centralised and De-Centralised systems they need to find the right balance between these two options.
- 45_+ platforms
- 22 design systems
- ~200 designers
- ~2000 developers
- 1 Spotify
- “Design Systems are for people” — Jina
- Now they are creating Encore
- Creating a Foundation with Design Tokens
- Web - a common base for all of Spotify’s web experiences
- Mobile
- Local Design Systems - tailored for specific use cases
- Encore for X - extensible architecture. Embraces the autonomous culture.
- Local Design Systems are built on top - but they doesn’t need to be 22 of them.
- Each system needs to provide design, documentation and code.
- Encore has different squads across the world. Working together.