Summary
Launching a design operations practice is always a challenge, but when you’re the world’s largest travel site, with 490 million monthly visitors and content in 70+ languages, the complexity can seem insurmountable. In this session, Eniola Oluwole will share TripAdvisor’s journey from groups of disconnected design teams with very little process, multiple style guides and no standard toolset, to an integrated organization with a thriving design operations practice. Attendees will learn how to communicate the value of a design ops practice, evaluate design management tools, engage their team in the process and identify the right time to hire dedicated support.
Key Insights
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Design teams at TripAdvisor initially operated in fragmented silos with over 20 different pattern libraries and no centralized governance.
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A culture focused on small UX optimizations created resistance to large-scale design changes, complicating design system stability.
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Stakeholders including designers, developers, and product managers all desired clarity on the official design patterns and accountability for decisions.
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Using an interim, familiar tool like Confluence helped quickly consolidate design patterns before launching a dedicated design system platform.
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Incentives such as cash prizes encouraged timely contributions to the design system but failed to foster long-term ownership.
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Establishing a product design steering group with cross-team leads empowered democratic decision making and aligned the dispersed teams.
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Governance and escalation processes were simplified to practical steps understandable by all team members to facilitate adoption.
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Design reviews evolved from post-launch showcases into iterative forums involving cross-functional teams, including researchers and PMs.
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Surveys revealed that 72% of users had never used the design system before, and 63% preferred old patterns over new ones due to findability issues.
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Effective design ops leadership requires adaptability, repeated iteration after failure, and enabling others to champion and communicate wins.
Notable Quotes
"TripAdvisor is really nine major business units each thinking like sub companies instead of one end-to-end user experience."
"People were very adverse to changes because a small 0.5% conversion increase meant millions in revenue."
"Everyone wanted to know what was the official pattern and who was accountable for it."
"We did a great cleanup of patterns from every decade and deleted anything off brand or untested."
"Once cash prizes were gone, people stopped feeling ownership of the design system."
"If you come with a big idea, they’ll try to dial you back to the smallest iota you can test first."
"Launching a design system is not a sprint, there’s no end, it’s always a continuous process."
"People felt designs were self-evident and too much explanation was a barrier to using the patterns."
"We stopped talking about patterns and consistency and started talking about scalability and speed to connect with stakeholders."
"You won’t know what success looks like until you put something out there and see how it works in practice."
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