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This file is the raw data from Episode 34, deep dive hosted on October 17, 2024 with Ben Callahan and Rebecca Garza-Bortman.

There are 85 answers. The question this week was:

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We’re mixing it up this week! Instead of asking you a question, we’re asking you FOR the questions.

My friend, and brilliant designer Rebecca Garza-Bortman is joining us as co host and we are bringing in a panel of design system consumers willing to answer all our questions. I have a sneaking suspicion that none of us are talking enough to the folks who have to use what we build. So, we’re pulling back the curtain!

Your job is to submit your burning question for someone who is a design system consumer. You have from now until Wednesday, October 16 to submit. Doing so will get you access to the live event!

What question would you like to have answered from a panel of design system consumers?
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Question 1: What question would you like to have answered from a panel of design system consumers?
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How would you describe a 'Design System' to a co-worker who has never heard of one? Do you have good feelings or bad about Design Systems?
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Where do you have or had the most friction using a design system or dealing with a design system team?
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When do you read the guidance and what kinds of guidance where are more helpful?
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When do you read the guidance and what kinds of guidance where are most helpful to you?
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How does the design system help you connect outside of your domain?
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How ready-made are you looking for when you're pulling in something from a design system (either from the design or code side)? Does that save time within your workflow or is that a myth of design systems?
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What is a change you would like to see in the design system that would make your job easier?
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What is the biggest pain point for you when it comes to using a design system?
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Have you ever used a design system that was *not* versioned? What was that like? What strategies did you use to adopt those components?

Have you ever used a design system that was co-located in a monorepo with your product UI? What was that like? What did you like/dislike about it?
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What role, if any, does a design system play in your copy-writing process? How do you work with design system contributors to ensure accurate content and do you make use of features like instance-overrides or other property-based features?
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I'm such a fan of this series, great work and great insights. Submitting two questions because I couldn't decide:

Can you share an instance where your design system helped you achieve a specific goal or solve a problem, but also limited your creativity or forced you to compromise on a design decision? How did you balance the need for consistency with the need for innovation?

Looking ahead to your future projects and initiatives, what features, components, or capabilities do you wish your design system had to help you achieve your product objectives?
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What have you noticed is missing from most design system documentation?
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1. Do you know when to ask the system to make a change to a component versus when its ok to break it for your use case?

2. Do you feel like a design system enables your work or hinders it and why?

3. Which best describes a design system to you?
a - A tool for design layout, b - Governance, c - I'm not sure what its benefit is, d - Other (fill in)
....and Why?______

4. Do you feel like you (or other designers in your company) need some kind of training on new components when they come out?
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What are some of the ways you have helped teams successfully adopt their own design systems? I'm thinking specifically about development teams here, but of course we are all in it together. Asking for a friend :)
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Does the experience of “X” match your expectations of “the brand of X”?
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 1.How you want to align, space and rout your North Star and the Goal?
2. What are your instinct pattern? Unwinding and combing moves? How much critical is it to you?
3. Stretching and embracing in an ocean of moments those are “ just mine but I never met before”.
4. How important is it to you to feel, gauge and fathom a new journey by yourself?
5. How do you appreciate and prioritise:
Internal ecology, external ecology, harmony, stark contrast
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How often are you using your DS for content guidance? If you don't have content guidance, what guidance would be most helpful?
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Do you feel pressure when asking the Design System team questions or when offering feedback about the system?
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What is the most frustrating thing about using design systems?

How often do you feel the need to deviate from the design system?
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What sorts of training, info, pre-read, etc etc information do you feel is missing from your design system? What would make your day-to-day easier in terms of feeling confident about using the system?
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How to change the culture to a non DS culture to a DS culture
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How do you keep yourself from being overwhelmed from either the amount of information, or the breadth of possibilities people working on design systems have to deal with? I am recently new (2 years) to working on DS, and I can't stop feeling I am both too late to the party, or chasing a never changing status quo.
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With the boom of all the different design system tools and plugins out there, which ones are the actually useful must-haves?
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We talk a lot about design systems, their intricacies, their place and value in organisations, how to implement and maintain them. But where does a design language fit within all this? What comes first a language or a system, or should we define them at the same time? What’s the relationship between a language and a system? Do we need to talk about design languages more?
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If a design system could do exactly what you wanted it to, what would it do, and how do you see it elevating your day-to-day practice?
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What do you normally reach for when seeking design system guidance? Is there a place you normally navigate to or search within?
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Which is more difficult - being a designer working on a Design System, or a designer working on features?
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Where do you see AI having the biggest impact on supporting design system customers?
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How do you communicate in your design system component is accessible or not

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What are your biggest challenges when designing using a design system?
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When and how do you feel unsupported by your design system team?
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What would help you "self serve" the most from a design system?
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I’ll be annoying and start by saying this is so system and company specific. We’ve recently ran surveys on satisfaction and ease of use with our consumers, based on the tasks they need to accomplish that involve the DS.
But if I’m thinking of questions that can be more generic, I’d ask:
What surprised you about using the DS? (Good and bad)
What do you wish the DS team asked you?
How would you like to be involved with the DS, and why?
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How do you tell the design system team what they produced is not usable for a new scenario?
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What functionalities or components would you like to see added to the design system in the future?
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What accommodations do you recommend when setting up a design system in a tool that’s new to those that will be using and maintaining it e.g. Figma?
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What fidelity are you looking for out of design tooling? How detailed does a design need to be to start a conversation with or communicate to a dev what you're looking for?
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Where do you see system evolution coming from? Do you expect it to come from the system team or are your product teams the ones leading that charge?
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How much does it matter to you if design assets (like Figma components) and code have 100% parity for visual presentation and/or behavior?

If you could bookmark only one thing in your browser for information about the design system, what would that link be?

When you have a question about the system, where or who do you go to first for an answer?

How do you define adoption and what comes to mind when you think about "adopting" the design system?

Do you contribute back to the system? If so, what does your contribution entail? If not, what is the primary reason?

Is there a role missing in the design system team that you feel would make your job easier?
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What type of support would you like from a design system team during the launch and adoption of a new design system?
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What are you biggest frustrations with your design system team?
What is the biggest benefits of your design system?
Which is more important; a robust foundational system where designers can piece together whatever they OR, an extensive pattern library?
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What’s your biggest blocker for using the Design System?
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What is the most useful part of the documentation to you.
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What aspects of the design system do you find most adaptable or customizable to your needs, and where do you feel the system restricts your ability to innovate or create efficiently?
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Do you feel valued by your design system team? If not, what could they do to make you feel like a key member of the system?
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In what scenarios have you found design systems to be most beneficial to your work, and under what circumstances have you encountered limitations or drawbacks to using the design system?
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Where are you most likely to read and consume documentation? Do you read documentation?
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How is your current design system making your life easier and how is it making your life harder?
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What things do you most commonly refer to design system documentation for?
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What is the hardest thing about using a design system? And if you had a magic wand, what would you fix?
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What's the top three things that make a design system easier to use than to not use it
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What do you dread about upgrading to the latest version of a design system?
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What's your pet peeve when it comes to using component libraries in Figma?
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I'm on a centralized design team, for context

1. We talk a lot about systems contributions but rarely get them, especially from design. How could we better collaborate and/or set up our product designers to effectively contribute?

2. What are some common reasons that product teams make systems deviations? How might DS teams help reduce deviations?

3. From the POV of a DS consumer, what's your ideal working relationship with the DS team? What are your biggest frustrations and pain points?

4. At multiple companies I've seen the following pattern: product designers create mocks that deviate from the DS and break components/styles, they come to DS office hours and the DS team points out the deviations and recommends using the system as is rather than breaking it bc the DS already solves for that use case, product designer decides to deviate from the DS anyway and hands off mocks to their eng team, their eng team reaches out to DS eng team because they can't implement the designs using the system, both teams spend a lot of time going back and forth about what to do next... Any insights on why this happens so often and what could be done to remedy it?
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What are some of the best examples of open source design systems at scale?
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What factors influence your decision to adopt or not adopt certain components from the design system?

How involved do you actually want to be in design system contributions and collaboration? What limits you from greater participation?

Do you prefer the system building solutions for you, working with the system to build solutions, or building solutions independently?
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Have you ever used a non-versioned system before? What did you like/not like about it?
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Design system was created to help teams to be more efficient with reusable components with a coherent identity in mind. However, I've been hearing more and more that relying on DS can inhibit creativity that designers require to solve problems. How might we build a design system that can cater to the visionary work or should DS stay out of it? As a DS consumer, what do you want from DS to better support your creative pursuits?
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What makes a design system successful to you?
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What are some emotions you have in the halo around your relationship with the design systems you use? Do you feel negative emotions like guilt for not using it when you should or positive feelings like excitement when you use it?
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What parts of your design system slow down or hinder your work? What parts help your work, or increase your velocity?
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We want the design system to be a place of collaboration and recognize it goes above and beyond traditional product work. What motivates/would motivate you to participate in system efforts, and what capacity/effort expectations would you have?
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What's more important: ease of use for designers, or ease of use for developers?
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What motivates you to use a design system? What deters you from using it?
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Does the existence of design systems feels like its limiting your creativity?
Or does it a real game-changer for you in terms of speed & efficiency?
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How do DS teams in your org deal with communicating updates. What do you feel does and doesn't work in this instance.... basically what do I need you to do to hit that little update button Figma.
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Tell me about a recent experience using a design system that left you wishing something about it was different.
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How often do you use your design system’s documentation site?

For those that have used multiple design systems, what is a common problem you typically have with them?
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What would you change about how your design system team works with you?
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If your design system includes design tokens, do you believe they will deliver the promised value of improved consistency, faster development, and easier maintenance?
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What's one thing that design system is not doing for you yet that would significantly support you in your work?
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Would a "component picker" be helpful? (A tool/quiz that allows you to choose the content purpose/benefit, etc. and point you to a list of components that accommodate those needs)

When you look for a component, how do you want to navigate? Are you browsing for a component name or a purpose/benefit?
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In your organization, what are the greatest specific gap/s between what your design system offers and what product development needs. (could be process, deliverables, program management or anything else).
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1. If your system was going through a full version repackage (replacing the entire current system's UI Kit and tokens): what resources would be most helpful for you to onboard to the new system? Or what has helped you in the past transition from legacy system to new?

2. What, if anything has regained your trust and confidence in a Design System team after it's been lost?

Thanks!
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What the most difficult part of attempting to use design system components, either in code or design?
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How do you contribute to your design system (design or code)?
What do you see most challenging about contributing to your design system?
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What's the most frustrating thing you encounter when trying to consume the design system to create a design?
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Do you actually use it?
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What's your greatest concern about the support you get from your design system?
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What is everyone doing
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What is one thing you’d like your design system to stop attempting to solve?
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Is component detachment a good statistic to know if the components need more variables or functionality
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What preferences do you have relating to guidance and training? (directly in relation to design systems that leverage new tech/features like web components, design tokens, prototyping platforms, etc.)
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From a design perspective, Do systems increase or decrease creative flexibility?
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What is your biggest struggle with adoption?
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