DISNEY STREAMING DESIGN SYSTEMS
Team
Disney Streaming
Scope
Design Operations Component Creation Program Management
Platforms
Web, Mobile, Connected TV
Date
2020 - 2022
OKR: Increase velocity of the product development process through system usage
Cut down design deliverables handed off to engineering by 30%.
Scale Asian-Pacific launch with unified type ramp.
OKR: Increase adoption of design system across design and engineering
Achieve 80% usage of new design system components for Star+ launch deliverables.
For Star+ and future pilots with modifications to existing templates, achieve 60% of specs via theming our decoder ring framework (focus on deltas).
OKR: Integrate design system program with product design process
Track newly created DSNSYMS board, every design system task in parallel to product design JIRA board 1:1 and triage 1x a week with DPM.
Meet with design leads to give status up to design leadership daily.
Co-lead a front ends dev design system working group with engineering leads where we can get early feedback on design system deliverables once-a-week.
From Product Designer to Design Systems Years 0-1
I came into Design Systems like many others carving out a niche, and managing 2 primary areas as one of the first 5 product designers on Disney+.
Web platform lead: Managing all our components and screen designs produced for our content discovery team (consumer facing, video watching and browsing experience).
Video player lead: Designed full end-to-end UX for our video player for web, mobile, and connected TV.
After our launch at the end of 2019, I spent the 6 months prior getting buy in to be our first official Design Systems IC, took on a team of 2 other IC, and later built out a team of 8 product designers, a design program manager, and a design technologist.
Simpifying our design deliverables
Facilitated workshops 2x a week for this 1st month
Heavy focus on better management of Sketch files in Abstract, then organizing of components to common schema across the 3 component libraries.
In diagram above, tested a pilot of doing a white-label, unthemed component library that we can theme our Disney+ components over to Star+.
Audit of existing component libraries to understand how we can better abstract components that have simple variants, like buttons
We had tried to transfer the same thinking to Figma, but at the time, the theming and nested component functionality we needed didn’t exist yet.
Routines and engagement
Fortunate case of being embedded in Design Ops to start, we were able to mandate designers reviewing work with design system team via our office hours, and created xs-sized JIRA tickets that we utilized DPM to enforce.
We helped the product design team with a JIRA framework for task tracking to document activities from design discovery to design delivery
Running a Pilot
The timing of forming our team right after we were starting work on a new app, Star+ that we needed to launch within 9 months. Starting in Jan 2021 for design discovery and launching the app in Latin American markets in Aug 2021. We took this opportunity to tackle various facets of the product design process to ensure the design systems team (currently 3 members) could effective support and scale in the future.
JIRA task templates, on product design board <> design system team board
Design system engagement and governance utilizing office hours
Simplified design delivery process, with focus on delivering less screen artifacts to engineering