A quick Google search will reveal countless articles, books, talks, and twitter threads about what design systems are, why you should build one, and how. Unfortunately, there's a frustrating lack of resources for how to take your existing design system from good to great.
When the Polaris design system team started asking questions like, "How do we know we're making progress on our mission?" "What should we be focusing our time and energy on to improve the system?" and "What do our users need?" we turned to the data to get some answers. The only problem? We didn't have any data... In this talk you'll learn about how Shopify's Polaris design system team built a custom data dashboard to get answers to some of our most existential questions.
We'll discuss how we decided what data was most important to us, the tech behind our custom dashboard, and how we're using these tools to make decisions in our journey to build the best design system for our designers and developers.
What do you need to know to be able to follow along?
Basic knowledge of design systems.
Relevance
Design systems are so hot right now, but there's a huge lack of resources for how to evolve your and existing design system. Attendees will learn some of the important considerations, learnings, and frameworks we developed when asking that existential question, "What do we (Polaris) want to be when we grow up?" This talk will focus on our ambitions to be a data-driven design system, and how we are accomplishing this while we figure it out in real time. By learning through our successes (and failures!) I'm hoping attendees will be able to take this back to their own design systems and apply some of our learnings to their own work.
Yuraima Estevez & Lo Kim
Yuraima Estevez is Development Manager on the Polaris Design System team at Shopify. She cares deeply about building open source tools, teaches developers how to create inclusive apps, and loves solving systems level problems. Her superpower is saying hello to every dog she sees, and her current obsession is her Stardew Valley farm.
Lo Kim is a senior developer on the Polaris design system at Shopify. In her spare time, she enjoys film photography and exploring the architecture throughout New York, where she lives.