For a design system to thrive and scale within a larger product ecosystem, core design systems team members can’t make all the decisions, design all design, code all code.

Instead, we fostered a federated community, opening the door to allow contributions.

When we decided that our style guides needed to evolve in a design system we knew that it should happen from a holistic point of view, where the entirety of the components represented a much greater value than the sum of each one by itself.

My role

I led the design and development of the contribution document. I partnered with a product design manager, an engineer, and collaborated with the product designers of the design systems team.

Detail every step

To ensure there was holistic thinking among the contributors of the design systems, we detailed every step and created a decision tree to help people go through the process.

Considerations

We wanted to make the contribution as frictionless as possible and created core considerations and questions people must keep in mind before contributing to the systems.

Contribution can be diverse:

  • A designer contributing component design via Sketch files, even though the component isn’t built in system code.
  • A visual designer offering a new colors for charts & visualizations.
  • An editor expanding the controlled vocabulary with 2 additional words along with Do/Don’t guidelines for the oxford comma section.

Here’s the process that was adopted for different sizes of contributions:

Small

Small changes can include fixing a functional, visual, or accessibility defect, objective improvements (such as a focus state), performance, and browser support. For code, such changes can be submitted as a pull request to a designated branch in the system repository, reviewed, and implemented in the team’s normal workflow.

Large

Large changes should undergo a discussion and proposal:

  1. Casual discussion
  2. Proposal outlining the contributor, detailed description, rationale, and relationship with ongoing system and product efforts.
  3. Triage & Clarification period to triage the request to refine and detail the proposal.
  4. Discussion & Consensus to expose the proposal to the Design System’s Council.
  5. Approval
  6. Implementation
  7. Documentation
  8. Recognition