Patterns Day 2019 - Alla Kholmatova
With the poetic beauty that we’ve come to expect from Jeremy Keith over the years, what could have been a more lovely way to start the day than how the last one ended. Alla Kholmatova gave a brilliantly unforgettable closing talk at Patterns Day 1 and she was back to open Patterns Day 2.
I’m not quite sure what I was expecting, I knew Alla was going to be great. But I think I was expecting lots of positive vibes about design systems. Instead the whole day had a subtle theme of being far more critical, encouraging and yet realistic about the struggles and the actual benefits.
Here are some of my notes, though I didn’t decide to start taking notes straight away so there was definitely more that I missed:
Testing a component per organisation. One can see same result every time whereas a different organisation can have absolute opposite result consistently
The revenue of design systems doesn’t come from consistency it comes from being able to quickly experiment and make new things
Figuring out brand isn’t the goal of a design system
“Establishing a brand is an excellent use of a design system but only if there is a reason for the decision”
marvelapp.com/styleguide “haven’t used it in the last year. We just needed to ship things really fast” isn’t that the point?
Over inflated expectations around design systems
Invest time in appropriate places. If you do a lot of forms focus on that otherwise focus on something else
Airbnb DLS have a component efficiency index, if you have a lot of components with high reuse factor and lots of people using then will save time to focus on that
Stage of product lifecycle affects it
Early stage is too fast to constrain a design system so have to adapt per stage
Marvel didn’t use their style guide because they were building a new application. Still strict about organising and sharing design language but “right now it needs to be a bit scrappy”
“Without react working on the design system always get like an uphill struggle” Jay Begum at Future Learn