Improving the designer experience
Supporting designers while a design system strives for platform parity.
Challenge
When I joined the Consumer Group Design System (CGDS) team at Intuit in 2024, the design system had been serving consumer-oriented products like TurboTax for over 8 years.
The team had heard feedback from designers about challenges arising during handoff to engineering due to lack of parity across platforms. Designers were learning too late that key components and features were unavailable in some platforms, and were often pushed to hastily rework designs to meet product development deadlines.
We identified this as a key challenge for our team to solve, and asked ourselves:
How might we enable designers and developers to understand the status of CGDS resources so they can build with confidence that resources needed will be available across all necessary platforms within project timelines?
The team had heard feedback from designers about challenges arising during handoff to engineering due to lack of parity across platforms. Designers were learning too late that key components and features were unavailable in some platforms, and were often pushed to hastily rework designs to meet product development deadlines.
We identified this as a key challenge for our team to solve, and asked ourselves:
How might we enable designers and developers to understand the status of CGDS resources so they can build with confidence that resources needed will be available across all necessary platforms within project timelines?
Approach
Ideal state
The obvious answer to this problem is to create parity across the platforms the system supports. While work to address discrepencies between platforms is in progress, it will take a long time to reach parity given current resourcing on our engineering team.
Pragmatic approach
In the meanwhile, I sought to identify initiatives that could help address this problem that we could own as designers without support from engineering. To do this, I needed to learn more about how our design users were engaging with the variety of system resources we provided.
The obvious answer to this problem is to create parity across the platforms the system supports. While work to address discrepencies between platforms is in progress, it will take a long time to reach parity given current resourcing on our engineering team.
Pragmatic approach
In the meanwhile, I sought to identify initiatives that could help address this problem that we could own as designers without support from engineering. To do this, I needed to learn more about how our design users were engaging with the variety of system resources we provided.
User research
I partnered with a teammate to design a study that would help us understand how designers used our Figma libraries, documentation, and support channels in their daily work on product features.
We focused on observing designers as they worked on current features in Figma and conducted supporting interview sessions as needed. Our study included participants from various feature teams with a mix of tenured and new-to-Intuit designers.
We also referenced findings from related studies conducted by other design systems teams within Intuit.
We focused on observing designers as they worked on current features in Figma and conducted supporting interview sessions as needed. Our study included participants from various feature teams with a mix of tenured and new-to-Intuit designers.
We also referenced findings from related studies conducted by other design systems teams within Intuit.
Research trends
We identified key trends we observed across multiple participants, and across other similar studies: