Design system themes
How might we ensure consistency across different platforms and devices?
Financial Services
Overview
Our organization faces significant challenges in maintaining consistency and efficiency across multiple systems, platforms, and products due to disparate design assets and custom theming.
Design tokens provide a single source of truth, ensuring that both design and engineering teams share a common specification language. This unified approach streamlines the handoff process, making collaboration more efficient and reducing misunderstandings.
Visual inconsistencies
Various token pipelines make it difficult to maintain consistency across products in design and code.
Manual token mapping
The lack of integration across applications creates confusion, inefficiency, and manual errors.
Single source of truth
Merged repositories, pipelines, and artifacts into one package, while also retiring redundant assets and infrastructure.
Token Architecture
We refined our token tiers by intent to establish a foundation for theme support like color and density modes.
Approach
A shared language is a critical factor when it comes to navigating conversation surround properties that translate to components and ultimately user experiences.
While design tokens can be an underlying piece of design systems that live behind the scenes, they are a critical player in building a framework to scale as new product offerings require new sub brands or user preferences like color modes and density.
Methodology
I primarily worked with two front-end engineers and an enterprise architect to audit and consolidate existing token repositories, synthesize recommendations with usage guidance, and determine the recommended practices for the enterprise.
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Key findings
- Inconsistent and generic naming conventions are used to describe tokens across systems.
- The absence of a documented programmatic approach to scale color across systems is a critical issue that needs to be addressed.
- It is imperative to ensure that all color combinations in coded components meet the AA-compliance standards for accessibility.
- Tokens are maintained manually across design software and coded repositories.
- Gaps in design software and front-end development created workaround paths, further confusing the source of truth in design decisions.
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Recommendations
- Define token naming convention to scale and support business units and their use cases outside core and system design tokens.
- Leverage Style Dictionary to transform defined brand visual styles across Android, iOS, Web, and Figma.
- Educate enterprise on token tiers, their intent, benefits and value to the broader organization.
- Define pilot platforms to collaborate and develop examples to demonstrate their value and flexibility.
- Show and don't just tell, instill confidence in community be walking through implementation paths for design and code.
User Flow
Constraints
Our greatest constraint during the scope of this project was ensure our token pipeline would scale to support syncing with our enterprise design tool, Figma. Limited documentation on how Figma creates variable IDs in their backend became an initial syncing challenge with testing across various files.
Critical
Dependent on third-party integrations
Tools like Token Studio and Style Dictionary are critical tools for syncing our token pipeline. Without them, we're at risk of not having an internal solution to scale in the short timeline we have to deliver.
High
Responsive design queries
Current design globally adopted by designers does not support media queries to determine responsive sizing for tokens. A workaround involves manually converting unit sizes and toggling a new theme mode.
Features
Our token architecture offers an opportunity to establish a strong foundation for scaling across business domains, platforms, and products.
Token naming standard
By classifying parts of token names we are able to scale our namespaces, properties, variants, attributes and modifiers as considerations for token creation and maintenance.
Color modes
Support for color changes such as light mode (well lit environment experience), dark mode (low-light conditions), or high contrast (enhanced readability).
Density modes
Compact mode reduces size and space between UI elements to fit more content on a screen while remaining accessible.
Impact
A consolidated token pipeline is a pathway to unifying our digital experiences regardless of what system version our consumers use.
$12.5M
Annual cost savings in UX improvements
8 Design Systems
Unified by latest token pipleline across enterprise
Takeaway
If there is one thing I want design token consumers to understand, design tokens are design decisions. Tokens enable teams to focus on experience while reducing the strain of color combination and type scale and maintaining a variety of repeated styles and code.
Lessons learned
- Design tools will continue to evolve. Remain focused on the intent of what your design system needs, not what it can do because of a design tool.
- Visual examples are critical for showing and not just telling stakeholders about the importance of design tokens and themes.
- Testing environments are critical in both code and design; they can help when reverting a defective publication with various breaking changes.
Some potential next steps
- Conduct discovery and analysis on internal associate desktop tools and approaches for them to benefit from a token pipeline.
- Tokenize motion properties to inform a motion principles playbook while providing reduced motion guidance as a requirement for accessibility.
- Explore data visualization with brand-theming support and color modes for color blindness.
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