I have worked with many different design systems, including Nike Digital, Nike Tech, and Salesforce. I brought this experience to NWEA when I was the lead designer on the creation of a design system within our product line.
Challenge
NWEA is committed to providing a WCAG-II compliant experience for all its partners. This raises the bar on complexity, as many typical UI “best practices” do not support accessibility tools.
Solution
As the lead designer on the design system, I managed a team of three junior designers and two front-end developers for REACT, with graceful degradation to all tech stacks. In one year, we established a DSM with Invision, where we maintained documentation for both designers and developers on how to get started with our design system. We created over 20 components in collaboration with designers, our accessibility community of excellence, and developers, and pushed them through our architecture team’s review process for acceptance. The team is slated to accomplish 20 more components in this next fiscal year.
Design Leadership
Design systems require both consistent interface and experience. It’s not enough to just create components. Without designers will use them inconsistently to address user needs, resulting in a fragmented look and feel that undermines the goal of the design system. As the design leadership on this system, I linked our components to design patterns and those design patterns to actions a user is trying to accomplish. Using this documentation, designers could search for the correct design pattern for the design challenge they were addressing.
Files
Please contact me for additional information on building, organizing, and managing design systems.
