Design Ops - Design Systems in practice

In many companies, even with the SCRUM methodology in place, the design process itself is still a waterfall process. Even if design is also an agile process, it’s very common that after the design phase, the designer loses control over the design.

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From concept to execution, there is a long process during which products often lose many important things.

Design Systems

Design System is a set of tools to help designers produce a cohesive, high quality User Experience. Design systems can start with: naming colors, objects, conventions, components and expand to include templates, animations, etc.

This helps Designers but there are still many other people who should use these standards in their everyday work.

Design Systems Ops (DesignOps, DesOps)

The main problem here is usually a lack of communication between design and engineering teams. Introducing the role of Design Systems Ops could be the answer.

DesignOps is inspired by the DevOps movement, of course. The idea is to allow people across an organization to design, redesign and improve products without losing quality, usability and coherence. DesignOps build and automate the design infrastructure to allow users to create new UX concepts based on established templates and standards. This allows every user on every organizational level to be part of the design process.

In the last Technology Radar authors listed DesignOps as a technique worth trying. This means that Enterprises should try this on smaller projects.

One of the first successful case studies of implementing DesignOps is AirBnB

The DesignOps team at Airbnb was loosely inspired by the DevOps movement. Having seen the gap between Engineering and Design at even mature tech companies, I felt that the DevOps concepts of cultural shift, collaboration and automation was 100% relevant. – Adrian Cleave is Director of DesignOps at Airbnb, How Airbnb build a DesignOps

Design Systems Ops is usually a role for a Design System Team member. He or she needs to be a designer who understands engineering or an engineer who understands design. The main goal is to figure out how to ship design ideas and templates (Design System) through the organization.

This looks like a particularly good idea for Startups, eCommerces, Banks and other organizations where the main products are digital and need to be coherent in every channel.

DesignOps Tools

Tools that could be useful:

Theo – Theo transforms and formats Design Tokens.Theo can consume centralized Design Tokens and output files for each platform.
Figma – Design tool with built in cross-team design systems which can export to SVG and CSS.P.S. Here you can see our PWA app designs in Figma under an Open Source license
Zeplin – Collaboration Tool between Designers and Developers
InVision Design System Manager (DSM) – Invision just bought Brand to build a complex Design System Tool
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