Getting Patchwork off the ground, meant that I had to fulfill many different roles throughout this project.
I was project managing the initial launch, facilitating discussions with senior stakeholders to get buy-in and seeking feedback and support from my peers within the product and tech department. If there was work that needed doing, I was either on the tools doing it, or seeking someone to help us get it done.
The Patchwork Design System is a multi-brand system that allows Immediate Media to design, test, build and iterate on a single product (Fabric) and serve it to the entire portfolio of special interest brands.
Brands such as BBC GoodFood, Gardeners' World, and RadioTimes, are interacting with tens of millions of users every single month, meaning our product has to be always improving to ensure we build strong and lasting relationships with our customers. "We build once and we build for everybody" – A Patchwork design principle
As the lead designer for Immediate Media's Patchwork design system, I have guided the process of continuous improvement of the system and ultimately, our products. Through our collective efforts, we become a more capable and confident product team.
It wasn't rocket science, it was more like making a rocket salad... following the recipe produced by InVision in their Guide to: Building an MVP Design System.
Ingredients
Method
I ran the governance team and help plan out the different initiatives we should work on to improve the system's overall performance and ROI for the business.
The system is never done and we have learned through this project that we can't get ahead of ourselves.
We can see the future in what industry leaders are doing in design systems, we are a long way off of that. But rather than "keeping up with the Jones' " we must be comfortable in our own journey.
This means
The key thing I learned about design systems through this process is that they are not one thing, they are many dynamic elements interacting and influencing each other. I found that the best way to approach this was not to aim for perfection but to aim for improvement through iteration.
One key example of this is when we made the conscious decision to keep our Web and App products separate. This allows for better flexibility and avoided UX and Tech debt built up on a web product that is over 8 years old.
While governed by the same principles and processes, this has allowed us to address some key redundancies that exist in our Web product. Namely, the colour system and naming conventions. The outcome of this project has made the App product more robust and will in turn influence our web product toward a more manageable set of design tokens.
