Design Systems Meetup @ F-Secure
On 6th of June F-Secure hosted 2nd Helsinki Design Systems Meetup — a series of events for people who want to learn more about design system tools, patterns and practices. The event was organized by F-Secure design teams in collaboration with Helsinki Design Systems community. This was a second time three F-Secure design teams (B2C CX, B2B CX and web team) worked together to contribute to Helsinki design community.
The idea behind the meetup was to discuss different approaches of how to integrate design system into an organization depending on who is the “customer” (end-user) of the design system. F-Secure design teams had identified three main “customers” within their organization — designers, developers and content creators.
First, Maria Assis, a Senior UI Graphic Designer from B2C CX team, had introduced her team’s story about adapting common unified UI Kit by all designers to both facilitate their work and achieve better consistency among design artefacts. Though Maria had acknowledged that UI Kit is not yet a full design system, but it is a first step towards it. B2C CX team’s approach to design system focused on designers as a main “customers”, mostly because majority of their products were either desktop clients or mobile apps. As a result, their main challenge was to adapt common brand and design style across different platforms, the task that could be best tackled by introducing common UI Kit.
The next presentation by Thiago Tomasi, a Visual Lead Designer from B2B CX team, told the story about development of web based design system, that focused on developers as main ”customers”. Majority of B2B products were web portals, hence the most direct way to achieve design consistency was to create a repository with coded web components and UX patterns that can be easily reused by developers. Furthermore, Thiago had stressed active communication as the most effective way of promoting design system within an organization.
Third presentation by Guillermo Escalon, a Web Manager for B2B web team, proposed a different angle to the concept of design system. Guillermo discussed the topic of content management systems (CMS) for large complex websites, where the main “customers” were content creators, who were neither designers nor developers, and thus required a different approach that would provide them with less technical tools. Furthermore, Guillermo discussed the way CMS could be adapted and integrated into organization, that it became a part of a larger design system.
These three presentations were followed by a panel discussion led by Mikko Häkkinen, a Lead Service Designer at Elisa and an active member of Helsinki Design Systems community. Mikko discussed with presenters the reasons behind having three different design system projects in one company and if it was possible to have only one at some point in future. The discussion mainly focused around different business needs that design teams tried to tackle, but also about benefits and challenges of having a single design system, as well as the way to achieve the latter. The follow-up question broaden the topic of design systems “customers“ and asked if we should also include other members of organization, like product owners, marketing and others, as well as end-users of our products to the “customers” of our design systems. Then Mikko addressed Guillermo if he thought that CMS could be a part of a design system or should it stay as a separate content management system. The final part of the panel discussion focused on the importance of communication in promoting design systems, as well as on sharing tips and take-aways to those who planned to start similar projects in their companies and organizations.
“The whole event planning and also the presentations made me think about how crucial communication and knowledge sharing is for any company to succeed in whatever they decide to pursuit. I think it was stressed in Thiago’s presentation, how important it is to have face-to-face conversations. I agree on that 100%. In this efficiency driven era, people easily forget that old fashioned discussions are a powerful tool.”
Suvi Otranen, Senior Web Designer, F-Secure B2B Web team
“I talked with people from ABB and Elisa about their design systems. It was very comforting to realize that the challenges we face with our design system are very similar to other companies’. Mikko from Elisa gave a lot of good insides on how to promote the project internally and on how to manage the project as a whole. While with Marjukka from ABB the conversation was more about the way they are planning to scale their design system.”
Thiago Tomasi, Visual Lead Designer, F-Secure B2B CX team
Helsinki Design Systems Meetup https://heldsm.com/
F-Secure Corporation: https://www.f-secure.com
