A designer and a developer walk into a bar…

A presentation at EmberConf 2023 in July 2023 in Portland, OR, USA by Melanie Sumner Temple

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A designer and developer walk into a bar…

Building a design system in Ember.js by Melanie Sumner and Jory Tindall

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Who We Are

Melanie Sumner Senior Design System Engineer Ember Framework Core Team W3C ARIA WG @melsumner

Jory Tindall Senior Product Designer Design technologist Saxophonist artist @jorytindall

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The Helios Design System

So we both work on the Helios Design System at HashiCorp.

https://helios.hashicorp.design/

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Today’s Agenda

So first, lets talk about what you can expect this talk to include.

It also helps you keep in mind when the end is going to be, since I know y’all are paying attention to that since we’re the last talk today.

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Design Systems

First, we’ll talk about design system themselves, and give a brief-ish introduction.

We’re all used to UI addons, shared components, even branding guidelines. A design system is none of those things in isolation, but inclusive of all of them and more.

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Challenges

Next, we’ll talk about a few… …and just a few, because we don’t have all day…. …just a few challenges we faced when starting our design system team

Hint: our challenges have been less about design and code, and more about people.

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Our Approach

Next, we’ll talk about how we decided to approach these challenges and some other things we decided to do that we think are pretty cool and set us apart as a design system team.

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Lessons Learned

Finally, we’ll cover the lessons we learned, And how they can help anyone else working on a design system or on a cross-functional team

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Ok before we dive in...

Ok before we jump in, we love our cats so here are some photos of our cats.

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Design Systems

okay! Design Systems. let’s talk about that.

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What is a design system?

We all probably know what a design system is from a technical perspective, but from a value perspective a design system helps product teams deliver UI at scale.

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A little bit of...everything

Here’s an abstract representation of all of the moving parts of a design system capturing the concept of “System of Systems” in which each focus area, process, or set of deliverables is treated as its own system within the larger whole of a Design system.

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What makes a successful design system?

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Where do the breakdowns happen in a system team?

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Challenges

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Challenge Exception

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Challenges: Scale

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Challenge: lots of apps!

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Challenges: Unification

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Challenges: That one react app

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Challenge: Legacy...everything.

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Challenge: new team!

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Challenge: Existing figma designs

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Challenge: existing UI addons

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Challenge: designer vs developer

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Challenge: same thing, different names

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Challenge: gaps

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Our approach

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Our approach: process overview

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Our approach: process details

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Our approach: component planning

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Component planning: audits!

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Component planning; requirements document

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Component planning: kickoff

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our approach: component creation

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component creation: design

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Component creation: more design

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component creation: design...the ideal

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component creation: development

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component creation: the cycle

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Our approach: documentation

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documentation: design

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Our Approach / Ambassador Program

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Ambassador Program: what is it?

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Ambassador program: why is it important?

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Our Approach: Meeting Cadence

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Meeting Cadence: Globally-distributed team

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Meeting cadence: weekly schedule

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Our Approach: Accessibility

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Accessibility: where is it in our process?

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Accessibility: In our code

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Accessibility: In our docs

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Accessibility: In our foundations

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Accessibility: conformance by default

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Lessons Learned

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Lessons Learned: legacy is real

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Lessons Learned:process is vital

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Process is vital: shared expectations

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Process is vital: uniting cross-functional teams

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Process is vital: thinking about our future selves

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Lessons learned: engagement

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Lessons learned: celebrate your wins

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Celebrate your wins: Hashicorp design system v2.8.0

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Helios by the numbers (part 1)

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Helios by the numbers (part 2)

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Happy consumer quote 1

“The Pagination component took something very complicated and in a matter of minutes, it just worked.”

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Happy consumer quote 2

“It’s well thought out, and handles 95% of our use cases. It’s incredibly composable within the limits of what a component should be doing.”

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Happy consumer quote 3

“(Adopting the design system) fixed major accessibility issues we had.”

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In closing...

You do not require permission to create accessible code.