DLUX Design System

Here’s the simple truth: you can’t innovate on products without first innovating the way you build them.
— Alex Schleifer, AirBnb

project overview

In 2014, only three Designers and a handful of Developers made up the Product team at ZapLabs. By 2018, our Design team grew to 14 Designers and over 70+ Developers. As the company scaled at a rapid rate, the Design and Development efforts multiplied. To unify the user interface and experience, we needed a consistent pattern library and reusable components to help deliver products efficiently and within scale. With a clutter of errant patterns, duplicated experiences, and far too many button styles we needed to resolve this problem. The solution was to develop a single source of truth — a design system.

goal

• Increased velocity: Web Components allow Developers to build scalable, performant, mobile-first products rapidly

• Increased efficiency: Teams are able to build and deploy applications quickly, requiring less time developing new features, while reducing back and forth in testing and QA

• Improved User Experience: Design Systems will enable teams to deliver high-quality prototypes, intuitive products, and consistent experiences — true to code, and at scale

design principles to guide DLUX

While our development team went to define their own practices, we created a list of attributes we admired in high-quality design work: things like Clarity, Beauty, Intuitive. The Design team never really found these actionable, and they weren’t helping us stay aligned as the team grew from 3 to 14 designers.

The question was asked: "what keeps getting in our way of offering great design to our users?” As we collaborated we then wrote out a list of our worst habits. We tasked ourselves on 'how do we counter these habits', and then we defined themes that we felt empowered us to do better. After deliberating, we narrowed it to just 5:

• Be Useful

• Be Clear

• Be Where Our User is

• Find Confidence

• Respect Relationships