If you build it but nobody knows about it, did it ever get built?

During my time at Wave I took every opportunity to socialize our design system and show how it can improve the user experience as well as the design and developer experience. I did this in the form of giving talks at Town Halls and communicated in our social channels.

A few of the design system initiatives I delivered and shared back were

• Responsive typography. Having a typography scale that adapts to it’s context.
• Design component migration. A plan to move our older components to our design system.
• Periodic design system updates shared in Slack.
• Design pattern education. Showing how certain design patterns adapt to their platform.

Working Group

I also was an active member of a working group called “The UI Working Group”. This was a cross team group of designers and engineers that had a passion for improving the front-end quality at Wave. We covered things like CSS, interaction, accessibility, layout, visuals, and responsiveness. We also helped out with code reviews that had a visual element to them, and made improvements to our various design systems frameworks like Buoyant and Lighthouse.

We acted as a bridge between Engineering and Design, to establish and disseminate the quality standards for front-end code at Wave, and to drive product improvements to our various codebases. I helped shape the responsibilities and actions of the group. I also helped recruit members from across the organization to get involved and advocated for “swarms” which were dedicated blocks of time where we would tackle large areas of the product that didn’t particularly fall under a specific team’s responsibilities.

During a UI Working Group “swarm”

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Impact