Design Systems London 2019 - Lily Dart

15 November 2019

At Lloyds there are 350 designers, with 9000 developers. Getting folks to use the design system is a massive effort.
“I tend to define the design system as the official story of how your organisation designs and build products” - Brad Frost
Official Culture doesn’t necessarily mean Real Culture.
What words would you describe your team culture when asked in an interview situation?
What words would you describe your team culture when asked by a friend over dinner?
Are the answers the same?
Why does the difference matter in a Design System, because you won’t talk about the things you want to do but cannot because of the real culture.
The gulf between reality and practice make it hard for Design Systems to land.
When we lust over Design Systems it’s usually from companies that have the official and real culture overlapping a lot.
“If the design system goes against the grain of the company, you are going to get unstuck.” – Shaun Bent
“As we grew and matured as a design team, our newer design clashed with the older parts” – Emily Brick, Buzzfeed
At Lloyds they started to build things within the existing culture of the company. It was more sharing UIKits on a server. They moved to Sketch Libraries but also found they were maintaining the components in 3 different locations.
They wanted to provide detailed advice in using components, rather than creating the components in yet another format.
How to deal with cultural mismatch:
- Make intentional compromises.
- Challenge the status quo.
- Pick your battles, and play the long game.