I ran a workshop with the design team to come up with ideas for how we might address the insights I derived from the research interviews.
The following themes were derived from the workshop
Looking at a few ideas from those themes, the following actions were taken:
To help address the blindspot problem and some of the other points, I started a weekly open working session. Think of it as “Office hours”. Designers could join and discuss anything they encountered lately, or simply observe as other designers worked through problems in not only Figma, but copywriting, research, and data. This is where we could also run games and quizzes to better name components and learn existing ones.
To address the spacing knowledge gap, components could have spacing built-in so designers wouldn’t need to reference a guide. Looking at our Toast component for example, It’s 32px from the bottom of any view, and we incorporated that space into the Figma component so all you have to do is align it to the bottom center. Reducing any confusion or inaccuracy between the file developers are working off, and the final result in code.
Designers reported they did not reference Buoyant because they did not want to switch between Figma and the browser, which is where the Buoyant guidelines lived. To meet designers where they are, a Product Design Guideline Figma file was created.
To switch from Figma to the browser, just to view design systems guidelines, seemed to be a point of friction.