A design system is only as good as its usage. Shared ownership and understanding of a design system can greatly help attain usage.
To understand where our level of shared ownership and understanding was, I put together a research plan and conducted interviews with all design team members. I asked questions pertaining to:
After conducting interviews with all 10 designers on the team, I tagged and analyzed the qualitative data. I shared back the insights, gathered feedback, and recommended next steps.
Research questions grouped into themes
After analyzing the interviews, I derived the following insights:
| Figma component blindspot | Figma component search has a blindspot. You can’t search for something if you don’t know what it’s called. |
|---|---|
| Spacing standards are unknown | Designers are guessing or “eyeballing” to verify spacing. |
| Buoyant is hardly referenced | Designers walked me through some of their Figma files, when asked about how screens were put together, Buoyant was almost never mentioned. |
| No Design System reviews | There was no check, verification, or review of design system components, patterns, or implementation. |
| No standard hand-off process | The way designers and engineers worked together varied wildly across teams. Every time an engineer worked with a designer, they had to learn new ways of working. |
| Copy & pasting = errors | When starting a new project, a previous project is duplicated or referenced. |
| Since the file it’s being duplicated from was never reviewed or evaluated, the errors in there will be duplicated as well (contagion). |
To address these, I ran a workshop with the design team to come up with ideas.
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