#DESIGN SYSTEM DESIGNER FULL#
As soon as you sign off on Friday, you will have a very happy weekend with no burden.īut since you are not working on any specific project, it can be tricky to tell a full product life cycle story if you are trying to pursue a new career. Those new feature requests from product managers will haunt you throughout the weekend.įor design system works, however, the tasks have more definitive acceptance criteria. Certainly, you may have a weekly goal defined for your sprint, but there is no “perfect” product.
Product designers are in a constant iteration loop. As a spokesperson of the company, you would always be ready to tell a compelling story to the outside world as the network builds up. Between Your Organization and the Outside WorldĪfter explaining the value of a design system the fifteenth time of the month to another internal team, you would also walk to external organizations and share your opinions, either through forums, Medium posts or through conferences. Being able to adapt to both mindsets helped drastically in my career. I am as fluent in prototyping with Figma as one can get, and also a React front-end developer who also knows a little bit about Angular and React Native (I know their APIs). You are onboarding each role to think like the other side.Īside from maintaining all the components, you need to help designers think in the developer’s way -“don’t just give me a damn ‘general look and feel’, tell me about the workflow logics and what to do in those edge cases” - and help developers actually learn to think - “what a fantastic implementation, but why should the user care about it?” You will be the supportive bridge between design and dev to help them learn to talk to each other in a uniformly agreed language. You would also have managers assigning one of their backend programmers to jump right into a front-end role while designing the entire UI on the go, because “that seems easy to handle”. You would have one designer shared by six different projects, with more in the queue each project has its unique technical challenge and requires rapid early-stage prototyping. If your company is in a transitional stage, you would smile in bittersweet to the quotation above.
My manager told me to do both designing and front-end developing for this project. You are effectively sharpening your UI skills with Occam's razor. You will soon find yourself on an accelerated path to think about UIs in a very philosophical way, broadening beyond each product’s use cases but reasoning about the principles guiding your design decisions. “This is not Google” “That looks very iOS” “Those need more affordance”. Slowly but steadily you will form a set of rules for projects to follow. Folks in the Marketing office might know their marketing strategy, but what does this mean when it comes to designing a user interface? There are a lot more beyond the correct hex value for those buttons. You will be governing products’ brands and usability. You will also notice that you are booked with design review sessions and surprise calls from various project teams. Therefore, you are always forcing yourself to stay up-to-date and be sensitive to the latest trends. You will be the inspirational muse, sparkling them with new ideas. Designers from individual project teams will approach you for either a “quick” opinion on something or surveying how other teams are approaching the same problem. You will be sitting at the center of your organization’s design community, serving as a portal between different projects. Between Designers from Different Product Teamsĭo you know other project teams using a table pattern like this? As your organization matures, the designer would shift from a “builder” to a promotional role. When we think about the job function of a designer for a design system, we think about those hex values for your brand, those many different shapes of buttons, and long documentation for design guidelines. Different organizations would have different roles, such as design operations, design advocates, etc., depending on the maturity of the design system.
TL DR: You will be a hub that bridges everything.ĭisclaimer: the experience below is based solely on my personal anecdotes as a solo designer in a (still growing) design system team. What Being a Design System Designer Feels Like
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