Walmart Global Tech
2020
Laying the foundation for the EBS Design System
Project overview
Building consistency across enterprise products
The Experience Design team sits within Enterprise Business Services (EBS), whose mission is to create and define user experience excellence for products and services across Walmart Global Tech.
Problem
The EBS design team grew rapidly to help support internal business partners on new software initiatives within the enterprise. These projects ran into difficulties during the development process due to inconsistent styles, patterns, and components across our product portfolio because of a lack of officially shared components in design or code. This lack of design standardization resulted in product delays due to numerous instances of refactoring by both design and engineering teams.
Solution
We proposed a design system across EBS to help decrease inefficiencies in the product lifecycle by improving consistency in design standards across both design and engineering teams. The goal was to provide a platform to support a wide range of products across internal product teams.
Role
As the design lead for this effort, my responsibilities included outlining the vision and roadmap and planning for the deployment of a new system across EBS. The goal was to establish a robust system that included design principles, documentation, and a design library kit with components to match in code.
Approach
Building support and understanding needs
Building a design system is a very large undertaking. Before any work could begin, we needed buy-in from Senior Leadership to move this initiative forward.
I prepared a presentation for Senior Design Managers, Directors, and the Vice President of the department to get the project approved. The deck contained information describing what a design system was, how it aligned with the department goals, a budget proposal, and a high-level roadmap of the resources necessary to create, manage, and deploy a system.
Research
To gain a deeper understanding of the existing issues described by stakeholders, we first needed to conduct user research. I partnered with a researcher to conduct user interviews to understand the needs of both designers and developers. These two user segments were selected as the central focus for the research effort because they were involved in key stages of the development process, from initial intake and project kickoff through design handoff, implementation in code, and finally product delivery.
Principles
Defining shared standards for design
Another aspect of the system we took time to define was design principles. Design principles are important because they help define the standards of design for a team. In essence, they represent the values the team wants to measure against when designing products. Up until this point, the team had not defined a set of values to follow.
Design Principles:
Collaborative
Simplicity
Research & Empathy
Universal and Accessible
Systematic
Audits
Mapping the existing design landscape
Before any system work could be explored, we needed to take time to conduct an audit of our products. An audit would help us better understand what products existed in our product portfolio and inform us how to proceed with our design standardization effort. The audit we focused on first revolved around foundational elements to help us better understand the landscape of styles needed for the new system.
Component Audit
After the foundational audit was complete, we made preparations for a second audit focused on larger parts of a system using the same project as in the foundational audit. In this case, the audit’s goal was to gain better insight into existing discrepancies in components and patterns. For this effort, I collaborated with each design lead for each project selected for the audit to identify existing components and categorize them into different groupings based on similar functionality.
Direction
Responding to broader standardization
As we continued to set up the foundations for a new system, we also began to define other areas such as governance for a new system (using Jira), design toolsets for future design libraries (Figma), building advocacy across the teams, team training, and researching how design tokens could be integrated into future front-end code. As we reached out to other teams for future collaboration, we learned that other teams had also begun working on similar system initiatives.
One team, Ecommerce in particular, had recently updated its own foundations after some internal brand changes were released by the company. After learning more about the work and the direction they were headed, I began meeting with their Head of Design to discuss our similar initiatives.
Outcome
Reflecting on the EBS initiative
In the end, the initiative to create a design system specifically for EBS never continued. Senior Leaders decided it would be best to try to adopt the other design system as part of a new standardization effort to streamline ways of working. With that said I’m very proud of the initial effort made to establish a new system. Given more time and resources I’m certain we could have made a system capable of improving the lives of my fellow associates across the Enterprise.
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