One year ago, we decided to create an official design system for our projects, starting with ASAP Tickets and Skyluxtravel. Both products are quite similar, but cater to different audiences. We wanted to make one unified design system that could be easily used across multiple projects. It's not rocket science, but it was the first time this company had attempted it.
Gathering developers from these projects, we discussed the possibility of creating a design system and what we would need for it. We realized that this was feasible and we could start developing our design system.
But before we start working manually, we should first get approval from the business and explain to them why we would need to spend 6 months on a design system. We presented a slideshow highlighting ROI, time to market, etc.
After approval, we moved to planning. We create a huge Epic in Jira and start to describe our system, we create next categories of our design system. We have separate file with variables for all projects and alias for them. We include colors and numbers like border-radius and spaces.
We needed this file for fast changing variables between projects which could be similar, for instance Landings or settings screen:
And we have files for every projects:
For this file we have this structure
Obviously, we made the great appearance for documentation
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Also we have file for components and icons. So, we have 2 projects, 3 files for every project and 1 common file:
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For every new component, we establish the following process for designer:
We describe each elements with a lot of details for designers and developers
We have been working with new design system since February, 2024 and we have already a great new numbers regarding new design system implementation:
We were really surprised when we compared the numbers in Jira for the similar tasks, so we just added admin panels, an online chat, and one more secret project to this design system, saving a lot of money for business. Today, we can launch new and manage current project faster than before. Thank you so much for helping with design system for Artem Udovichenko and Roberts Kaplans.
For new landing experiments, developers can't quickly test new forms because they have to implement new elements of the design system. Therefore, we have decided to skip the design system implementation stage during the experimentation period. However, after a successful experiment, we will officially add a new component to the design system.
When we made the decision to apply this design system to another project, we encountered many questions and realized that we lacked proper documentation for developers on how to connect the design system to the project. We quickly fixed this.
We began in July of 2023 and were optimistic to complete it by November of the same year, but unfortunately we had to continuously switch to other projects. We finally released the initial version of the design system in February of 2024.