Varya Stepanova’s Post

I've had 3 conversations this week with 3 different people who are deep in the weeds implementation design token architecture for their design systems. The discussion is always the same: it's important but eye-crossing, tedious, slow-going work. It's necessary work but is complicated because it's effectively inventing a language. Teams come out the other end wondering "Did we do this right? Are we going to need to make changes?" How can this go smoother? Well, hire Big Medium! While of course this is self-serving, design token architecture is honestly an area where bringing some expert consultants in makes a lot of sense. We've done this 100s of times (well, it sure feels that ways), have iterated over the gory details over the course of close to a decade. Design token architecture is important! But it's weird! There are certain truths! But there are always org-specific nuances that are important to accommodate! It's cross-disciplinary! There are weird questions! Who owns what? How do you keep things in sync? Can you automate this? How does it work for 3 or 300 brands? What's the workflow? How do you handle changes? Let us be your design token architecture sherpas and help you implement your design token architecture in Figma, code, and documentation. We accelerate your efforts by helping your team make crisp decisions, avoid weird left turns, and give you a lot of material to reference and adopt (but only if that's helpful). We offer workshops, coaching sessions, and co-creation projects; really whatever you need to get the job done. You'll come out on the other side with a sturdy architecture in place and can move forward with confidence onto bigger and better things. So that's the sales pitch! But it's coming from a genuine desire help teams get through this necessary-but-sloggy work far faster than they'd get on their own. If your team could use some help with your token architecture, don't hesistate to reach out: https://lnkd.in/gk3JpKbN #designtokens #designsystems

𝗗𝗲𝘀𝗶𝗴𝗻 𝗦𝘆𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗺𝘀: 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗕𝗮𝗰𝗸𝗯𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝗦𝗰𝗮𝗹𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝗣𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗺 𝗦𝗼𝗳𝘁𝘄𝗮𝗿𝗲 🚀 In the world of platform software, consistency and efficiency are crucial. A design system acts as the backbone, enabling teams to build faster, maintain consistency, and scale seamlessly across multiple applications. But what exactly is a design system? It’s more than just a collection of UI components. It’s a unified language that includes principles, reusable patterns, accessibility guidelines, and documentation that empowers cross-functional teams—designers, developers, and product managers—to work harmoniously. 𝗪𝗵𝘆 𝗶𝘀 𝗶𝘁 𝗶𝗺𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁𝗮𝗻𝘁? 1. Consistency at Scale: A design system ensures that every component across your platform looks and behaves consistently. This improves the user experience and reinforces your brand identity. 2. Efficiency for Teams: Instead of reinventing the wheel, teams can rely on prebuilt, tested components. This reduces development time, minimizes errors, and accelerates time-to-market. 3. Improved Collaboration: With a single source of truth, designers and developers speak the same language, leading to fewer miscommunications and smoother workflows. 4. Adaptability and Scalability: A well-structured design system grows with your platform, making it easier to add new features and adapt to future needs without technical or design debt. 𝗔 𝗣𝗿𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗘𝘅𝗮𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗲: Imagine your platform requires building multiple user-facing applications—one for desktop and another for mobile. Without a design system, maintaining uniformity across these apps becomes a herculean task. But with a design system in place, you ensure that buttons, inputs, colors, and interaction patterns remain consistent, regardless of the device. 𝗠𝘆 𝗧𝗮𝗸𝗲𝗮𝘄𝗮𝘆: Investing in a design system is investing in the future of your platform. It's a long-term strategy that empowers teams to deliver value while maintaining quality. Whether you're building your first system or refining an existing one, remember: it's not just about the tools—it's about fostering a culture of collaboration and consistency.

Designer: person who turns requirements into blueprints for developers. That's like saying a chef is someone who turns recipes into food. But many designers I talk to tell me that's what their role is. There are many reasons this occurs: • Companies that focus on features over customer transformation and endless shipping mean designers never have time for discovery work. • PMs own discovery entirely, which is inefficient when compared to sharing the responsibility with the designer. • Nobody at the company is aware of or advocating for design practices like UCD or JBTD theory. Instead of only delivering blueprints, designers should align stakeholders, identify knowledge gaps, conduct research to address the gaps and deliver insights. A big part of this is listening to our customers to understand the transformation they're looking for. Sometimes, giving them more features just makes it harder for them to achieve that transformation. But it's also about talking internally to developers, support staff, data analysts, product and business leaders to identify their goals so that you think about your work as it relates to: • The business goals • The user's needs • Our capabilities • Product vision The way to achieve this is to have a rigorous approach to discovery that includes problem analysis and stakeholder mapping. If you're interested in improving your discovery process and moving from delivery person to designer, please add yourself to the waitlist and help me out by filling out this survey: https://lnkd.in/e9WfWMbz The image below is from the book When Coffee and Kale Compete about Jobs to be Done theory. It's the best design book that isn't really a design book ever, and you can read it for free.

🎨 Building Consistency and Efficiency: Design Systems & Pattern Libraries 🌟💻 Design Systems and Pattern Libraries are indispensable tools for streamlining design processes, fostering consistency, and enhancing collaboration across teams. Let's delve into their significance and impact on modern design practices: 🔹 Design Systems: Design Systems are comprehensive collections of design guidelines, components, and patterns that establish a cohesive visual language and interaction framework for digital products. By centralizing design assets and principles, Design Systems empower teams to create consistent, user-centric experiences efficiently. 🔹 Pattern Libraries: Pattern Libraries, also known as UI libraries or component libraries, are repositories of reusable UI components and design patterns. These libraries provide a modular approach to design, enabling designers and developers to assemble interfaces rapidly while ensuring visual coherence and usability. Key benefits of Design Systems and Pattern Libraries include: Consistency: Establishing consistent design patterns and guidelines across products and platforms enhances brand identity and improves user comprehension and trust. Efficiency: By reusing pre-designed components and patterns, designers and developers can accelerate the design and development process, reducing redundancy and promoting efficiency. Scalability: Design Systems and Pattern Libraries facilitate scalability by accommodating the evolution of design requirements and accommodating new features and functionalities seamlessly. Collaboration: Shared Design Systems and Pattern Libraries foster collaboration and alignment across multidisciplinary teams, including designers, developers, product managers, and stakeholders. Accessibility: Integrating accessibility principles and best practices into Design Systems and Pattern Libraries ensures that digital products are inclusive and accessible to all users, regardless of their abilities. Embracing Design Systems and Pattern Libraries empowers organizations to deliver cohesive, user-centric experiences that resonate with their audience and drive business success. Let's continue to champion design excellence and innovation! 🚀🎨 #DesignSystems #PatternLibraries #UXDesign #UIUX #DigitalDesign #Collaboration

🚀 Unveiling Our Software Design Process: A Visual Journey! 🚀 I’m excited to share a new project we’ve been working on that highlights our software design process through an engaging graphical showcase. This visual representation captures the essence of how we turn innovative ideas into fully functional, user-centric software solutions. 🎨 From Concept to Completion: Our process begins with a deep dive into understanding user needs and market demands. We brainstorm, sketch, and prototype to ensure every angle is covered before development begins. 🛠️ Collaborative Development: Collaboration is key! We integrate feedback loops and iterative testing to refine and perfect our designs. This ensures our software is not only functional but also intuitive and delightful to use. 🔍 Detail-Oriented Design: Every element, from user interfaces to backend systems, is crafted with precision and care. We prioritize performance, scalability, and security to deliver robust and reliable software. 📈 Continuous Improvement: Post-launch, we gather user feedback and analyze performance metrics to continuously improve our software, adapting to evolving needs and technology trends. Check out the graphical showcase below to get a detailed look at each step of our software design journey. We hope this visual story inspires and informs others about the meticulous work behind great software design. #SoftwareDesign #UXDesign #Development #Innovation #Tech #TechInnovation #DigitalTransformation #FutureOfTech #TechTrends #Innovate #SoftwareDesign #UXDesign #UserExperience #AppDevelopment #ProductDesign #SoftwareEngineering #DesignThinking #AgileDevelopment #TechCommunity #DevLife #BehindTheScenes #ProcessShowcase #Inspiration #Creativity #TechInspiration #CareerGrowth #TechCareers #ProfessionalDevelopment #LearningJourney #SkillBuilding #VisualStorytelling #Collaboration #TeamWork #DesignProcess #InnovationJourney #LinkedInreach

💩💩 Don't Put Crap In The Design System 💩💩https://lnkd.in/ei-ubFsA It's one of my favorite Josh Clark lines that cuts through the noise of a conversation. What is crap? Crap is rushed work, low-quality work, shortcuts, experiments, first drafts, one-offs, and other unvetted/untested/unverified work. Let’s be clear: crap is inevitable and is produced for reasons both unfortunate and understandable. But while crap is an unavoidable part of product design and development, it has no place in a design system. A design system is critical frontend infrastructure, therefore it needs to be sturdy, reliable, and dependable. Design systems contain boring, tried-and-true, vetted, high-quality solutions to common problems encountered at an organization. When consuming teams encounter crap when working with the design system, trust is broken and the integrity of the system erodes. Those experiences can very much impact the long-term success of the system. For those reasons, a design system needs to be protected from crap. So how should we deal with crap? - Slow down (easier said than done!) - Establish a layered UI ecosystem (https://lnkd.in/eKm7ysDi) - Recognize the design system and products move at their own pace (https://lnkd.in/d7BVsrAy) - Create a recipes layer in the ecosystem (https://lnkd.in/dAcUGprA) - Formalize a governance process and prioritize conversation and communication (https://lnkd.in/eeSRU2t) - Always use branching in your workflow Crap is inevitable, but implementing these tactics can help organizations manage it in a controlled and thoughtful way. At Big Medium, we help teams deal with crap all the time, so if your organization could use some help, get in touch! https://lnkd.in/gk3JpKbN #designsystems #crap #process #governance #uidesign #uxdesign #

Revolutionize Design Feedback with Real-Time Updates! Traditional feedback methods can be slow and confusing. Architects, designers, and clients can collaborate seamlessly with real-time updates and downloadable reports.  1. Instant communication for faster approvals   2. Professional PDFs & PPTs for offline access   3. Streamlined workflows for fewer revisions  Say goodbye to delays and hello to efficient teamwork! Transform how you manage projects and deliver exceptional results.  Read more about how real-time tools are changing design feedback:  https://lnkd.in/eaygutv4 #DesignInnovation #ArchitectureTech #CollaborationTools #RealTimeUpdates 

Very interesting article. I wonder how quickly designers are adapting to leverage these efficiencies in process?

As a product designer, you’re easily replaceable if all you do is deliver designs to developers. To add more value and make yourself a strategic partner, work on your ability to deliver insights and vision. To become that kind of designer, you need to: Be heavily involved in product discovery ------------ The common issue I hear is, “My PM already does this.” If you’re leaving this entirely to a PM, start splitting up responsibilities now, but do it from an attitude of support and humility: “I’m interested in doing more discovery work. Can I help you out by dividing up the work?” Not from entitlement: “I should be doing this; it’s a designer's job as well.” Understand their process; if they're more senior and you haven’t done much discovery work, help and learn; otherwise, see if you can augment it with your own additions. If you want this collaboration to last, highlight how their contributions have helped you achieve better results. Big them up, praise them publicly, and share how the collaboration benefits the designs. Gather and report customer feedback ------------ Ideally, talking to customers, but there are also other ways to get insights: support chats, sales calls, product reviews, social media, surveys, and user tests, for example. Reporting on these insights helps shape the future of the product, increasing the value and scope of your contributions and shifting you more towards a knowledge worker than a pure delivery worker. Talk to stakeholders ------------ To use your design skills to create a vision of the product's future, you need to talk to product and engineering leadership to understand their goals and what’s feasible. That way, you can ensure that whatever artefacts you create are practical, aligned with their ideas, and can be used in conversations that build alignment. In summary, to become a more strategic partner: - Talk to stakeholders - Collaborate in product discovery - Gather and report customer feedback Use all of that context to: - Deliver insights, not just designs - Use your design skills to create a vision of the future If this was helpful, consider enrolling in my course to become a more strategic designer, it starts Aug 12, and there are still a few seats left: https://lnkd.in/dnvcfR5h

The Transformative Power of User-Centric Design As Business Analysts, we often find ourselves bridging the gap between technical capabilities and user needs. One lesson I've learned throughout my career is the transformative power of user-centric design. A few months ago, I was involved in a project that aimed to overhaul a legacy system used by hundreds of employees daily. Initially, we were focused on technical upgrades and efficiency improvements. However, early user feedback revealed a disconnect—the real issues were usability and frustration with the existing interface. We shifted our approach, incorporating user-centric design principles. We conducted user interviews, created personas, and facilitated design thinking workshops. The results were astounding. Not only did we build a more intuitive system, but we also saw a significant increase in user satisfaction and productivity post-implementation. Here's why user-centric design is crucial: 1. Real Solutions for Real Problems: It ensures we're solving the right problems by deeply understanding user needs. 2. Increased Adoption: Users are more likely to embrace new systems if they find them easy and pleasant to use. 3. Innovation through Empathy: By empathising with users, we often uncover innovative solutions that wouldn't emerge from a purely technical perspective. One tool I’ve found invaluable in this process is empathy maps. This tool has consistently helped me visualise user experiences and pain points, leading to more impactful designs. How have you integrated user-centric design into your projects? Share your stories or tips below. Let’s inspire each other to keep the user at the heart of our solutions.