Goal
Flattening the customer learning curve by delivering clear product coherence so users can spend more time solving their problems than learning how to use individual products.
Opportunity
Upgrade and coalesce the entire product portfolio under a single robust but flexible design system to:
- Deliver a coherent and industry-leading design vision across the entire Splunk portfolio.
- Unify disparate product designs to solve persistent customer issues with workflow inconsistencies.
- Build an iterative flywheel of feedback and communication to drive delivery priorities and development transparency.
- Ensure out-of-the-box accessibility compliance by default with the adoption of provided UI components.
Solution
The mistake many design systems efforts make, which often leads to failure, is to focus on compliance instead of coherence. Different products may be related within the context of selling and delivering customer-focused portfolio solutions. Still, it is necessary to respect individual product requirements, limitations, and use cases that prioritize consistency over orthodoxy. This is how I approached this problem with my design system team, getting them to work with each individual product team to not only understand where they sat in relation to the overall design vision we were seeking to deliver but also to internalize their specific needs and requirements as partners not merely as consumers of our output.
Outcomes
- Delivered a highly relevant and pragmatic design system planned at the organizational level but refined and implemented at the scrum team level ahead of schedule across all products.
- Developed a metric-driven adoption plan that ensured successes could be tracked and problem areas anticipated before they created product delivery issues, reducing design churn and component defect counts by 40%.
- Solved systemic portfolio accessibility issues by delivering compliant components, enabling product teams to deliver WCAG and ADA-satisfying products by default with minimal additional development effort and without sacrificing overall usability.
- Worked closely with the corporate brand team to ensure visual alignment between product and marketing and leverage customer insights between both teams for maximum effect.
Accomplishments
- Changed the perspective of the design system from roadblock to enabler. This was not the first attempt to build and implement a design system at Splunk. But it was far and away the most successful. Instead of focusing on strict adherence to design guidelines as the goal, I worked with product teams to understand their specific challenges and delivered a solution that enabled them to overcome those issues as equally important as making products look and feel more coherent.
- Gave product teams ownership through flexibility and trust. Instead of designing a UI system out of view of product teams, we engaged with them throughout the process. We regularly solicited feedback on proposed solutions and on the process of implementing the design system. Listening and respecting the needs of individual product teams enabled a more productive working relationship and accelerated the adoption and delivery of shipping products.
- Made delivering better product experiences for customers easier. As with every other product design problem, I approached this one with the mindset of doing what’s best for the customer. Too often, design systems are built from the designer’s perspective as a means of delivering better-looking products. However, it is essential to remember that a design system has multiple end users: the paying customer who needs familiarity and consistency to become more efficient in their day-to-day work and the product developer who needs a design system that saves them time when building UI-level workflows and reduces churn on unnecessary iterations later on due to a lack of clarity when implementing a design spec initially.
What I learned
- Collaborating with partners is better than dictating to skeptics. Making an effort to solicit input and opinions from the cross-functional stakeholders consuming your design output is the best way to achieve buy-in. This also has the added benefit of hearing the valuable perspective of the people consuming your design product. A customer is a customer at the end of the day.
- Communicate transparently, early, and often to build a community of like minds. If people don’t know why a decision is made, they are unlikely to feel invested enough to faithfully follow it. Keep the pipeline of information flowing so individuals are as comfortable with the why and when as the what and how.