Rosenverse

Log in or create a free Rosenverse account to watch this video.

Log in Create free account

100s of community videos are available to free members. Conference talks are generally available to Gold members.

Building a New Home for the Atlassian Design System (Videoconference)
Thursday, October 22, 2020 • Enterprise Community
Share the love for this talk
Building a New Home for the Atlassian Design System (Videoconference)
Speakers: Charles Lee and Jennie Yip
Link:

Summary

Having a design system is a de facto necessity when building cohesive enterprise software. The challenge is how does it all come together with a single location, a source of truth, a website? How does a cross-functional team marshal the resources with political and technical willpower to achieve this goal? It’s no easy feat as Jennie Yip, Atlassian design systems lead, explains in this Medium essay. This fireside chat will dig deeper into the problems addressed and lessons learned, with Jennie and also Charles Lee, the engineering lead. Hearing their stories will inspire and inform all of us in our design system journeys. We hope you will join us!

Key Insights

  • Inconsistencies between design specs, Figma, Sketch, and code caused user confusion and mistrust of documentation.

  • Atlassian’s Constellation project aims to create a single source of truth unifying designer and developer documentation.

  • Live code examples embedded in documentation replace static images, ensuring up-to-date and interactive component previews.

  • Collaboration and early involvement between designers and engineers are critical to successful design system evolution.

  • The project spanned multiple years and team changes, requiring extensive documentation and ‘run books’ for onboarding.

  • Governance is framed as shared execution rather than policing, fostering buy-in instead of compliance tension.

  • Design tokens improve handoff accuracy, although integration with Figma is still partly manual and evolving.

  • Multiple local design systems coexist alongside the central system, typically as downstream consumers of core components.

  • Roadmap alignment between platform teams and product teams remains one of the biggest operational challenges.

  • Extensive user research including usability tests and tree card sorts informed navigation, IA, and content strategy.

Notable Quotes

"Kate considers live code to be the source of truth because she can’t trust the design site due to inconsistencies."

"If engineers don’t like what we’re doing, they absolutely will not adopt our design system."

"Governance shouldn’t be policing; we’re here to help create the best experience and save time."

"This project has a lot of history and required synthesizing findings from many people over years."

"Design systems reflect organizational structure – if designers and engineers are siloed, no tooling will fix that."

"Updating and adopting design system components requires company time and planning—for some teams, fast release cycles were too frequent to keep up."

"Docs as code is a philosophy that keeps documentation in workflows familiar to content designers and engineers alike."

"Prior prototypes and documentation of pain points helped pave the way and garner stakeholder buy-in for Constellation."

"We use MDX and markdown so designers can edit documentation directly through pull requests."

"Empathy on both sides is key—engineers need scoped work, designers need to understand engineering constraints."

Ask the Rosenbot
Vincent Brathwaite
Opener: Past, Present, and Future—Closing the Racial Divide in Design Teams
2020 • DesignOps Summit 2020
Gold
Louis Rosenfeld
Welcome / Housekeeping
2023 • Enterprise UX 2023
Gold
Lada Gorlenko
Theme 1: Discussion
2024 • Enterprise Experience 2020
Gold
Jennifer Kong
[Case study] Journeying toward AI-assisted documentation in healthcare
2024 • Designing with AI 2024
Gold
Scaling Design through Relationship Maps
2017 • DesignOps Summit 2017
Gold
Alana Washington
Theme 3 Intro
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Peter Merholz
The Mysterious Case of the Missing UX Career Path (Videoconference)
2022 • DesignOps Community
Sam Proulx
To Boldly Go: The New Frontiers of Accessibility
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Aras Bilgen
Research Democratization: A Debate
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Stop Talking, Start Doing
2017 • Enterprise Experience 2017
Gold
Sarah Alvarado
How to make UX research leadership more effective [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series] (Videoconference)
2023 • Advancing Research Community
Victor Udoewa
Theme One Intro
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Gordon Ross
12 Months of COVID-19 Design and Digital Response with the British Columbia Government
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold
Rachel Posman
"Ask Me Anything" with Rachel Posman and John Calhoun, Authors of the Upcoming Rosenfeld Book, The Design Conductors
2024 • DesignOps 2024
Gold
Jose Coronado
People First - Design at JP Morgan
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
John Paul de Guzman
10k Screens Later: How We Became a Data-Driven Design Organization
2024 • DesignOps 2024
Gold

More Videos

Alex Hurworth

"Restoration is not just about replanting trees; it’s about rebuilding entire ecosystems."

Alex Hurworth Bonnie John Fahd Arshad Antoine Marin

Designing a Contact Tracing App for Universal Access

October 23, 2020

Laine Riley Prokay

"We started to ask ourselves, does every new Design Ops practitioner need 10 years of experience like Lisa and I? What opportunities are we missing by not having more junior roles?"

Laine Riley Prokay Lisa Gordon

Carving a Path for Early Career DesignOps Practitioners

September 9, 2022

Eniola Oluwole

"If you come with a big idea, they’ll try to dial you back to the smallest iota you can test first."

Eniola Oluwole

Lessons From the DesignOps Journey of the World's Largest Travel Site

October 24, 2019

Nathan Shedroff

"Design researchers know customers better than almost anyone else in the organization, yet they are rarely invited into strategy processes."

Nathan Shedroff

Double Your Mileage: Use Your Research Strategically

March 31, 2020

Sam Proulx

"Mobile browsers are typically updated with the OS, reducing variability compared to desktop browser versions."

Sam Proulx

Mobile Accessibility: Why Moving Accessibility Beyond the Desktop is Critical in a Mobile-first World

November 17, 2022

Feleesha Sterling

"At LinkedIn, rapid research uncovered trends across products that helped reduce duplicate work."

Feleesha Sterling

Building a Rapid Research Program (Videoconference)

May 18, 2023

Neil Barrie

"Brand and product become two sides of the same coin when user insights have a seat at the top table."

Neil Barrie

Widening the Aperture: The Case for Taking a Broader Lens to the Dialogue between Products and Culture

March 25, 2024

John Devanney

"The real question is what is it about delivering the value of design at scale."

John Devanney

The Design Management Office

November 6, 2017

Katy Mogal

"Small experiments that fit into existing structures make it easier to involve collaborators and reduce resistance."

Katy Mogal

But Do Your Insights Scale?

March 12, 2021