As the Product Designer for the Design System team, every day I wake up with three main goals:
- Make the lives of those who design easier
- Bridge the gap between designers and developers
- Don’t re-invent the wheel
Make the lives of those who design easier
Designers should be focused on creating user centred experiences, not worrying about the icon to use for an accordion or the border radius of a form field. That’s where I spend most of my day, so others don’t have to. With every addition or update I take into consideration the visual language and consistent graphical elements of our Design System to ensure we build for re-use, adaptability and scalability. Helping anyone involved in the design process to ideate and prototype quickly without having to start from scratch.
That’s where my second goal comes in…
Bridge the gap between designers and developers
We can no longer work as if pixel perfect design files are the final product, they are simply a communication tool (Figma Config 2021). Software is what brings a designer’s hard work to life. Therefore, we want to make both designers and developers lives easier by creating a common base that means that translation from Figma to code is as smooth as possible. I’m extremely lucky to work with amazing developers to ensure each asset created aligns, both visually, and how it’s layers and function are communicated. Helping to create a smoother handoff from design to dev.
Now it’s not seamless yet, we know we have a long way still to go. But with every small step we take to align the tools designers and developers work with, we get closer to building more efficient design operations in NSW Government.
Speaking of efficiency…
Don’t re-invent the wheel
Teams all across NSW Government are doing amazing work every day. They are building products and solutions that are improving the lives of those living in NSW. We don’t want to tell teams the best way to meet their unique user needs, we want to give them the tools to deliver on them.
That’s where we see designers and developers as our biggest users and contributors. We don’t want to re-create solutions that teams have already solved and implemented, instead we want to champion that work and build it into our way of working. Almost everyday I’m on our digital community, replying to requests or catching up with teams to talk about what they’ve created and how we can feed it back into the design system.
Design is layered and complex, and a central resource of contributions means sharing the benefit of other designers with different niche expertise, across UX, UI, Visual, and Content design.
To truly be a community driven design system, we need to work with our users to continually build and adapt to their needs, so they can do the same for their users.
Where to next?
Now you’re on a design system roll, check out our new Documentation site where design language meets code mark up. You can also get chatting on our Digital Community for the latest updates and connect with other digital teams in NSW Government.
PS. Is the Design System missing something? Let us know!