...
Half hour interviews conducted with six internal staff including: marketing manager, product manager, engineer, engineering manager, accessibility specialist, and ux designer.
Key Takeaways
1. What aspects of the current workflow do you think could be improved?
A more methodical approach to meeting accessibility standards
QA is hard to do. We have an undependable staging environment and lack sandboxes for UI testing.
…
Engineers working transactionally with designers, and not having direct engagement with the design team in general.
2. If you had a magic wand and could change one thing about how things work here, what would that thing be?
Dedicated engineering time to build accessibility tooling or features.
Clearer tie between roadmap and product strategy.
…
.
Would abandon Bootstrap and use CSS and JS instead to simplify and change the tech stacks related to Paragon. Bootstrap requires one to have a big monolithic stylesheet that has a lot of subtleties that need to be worked out and is confusing tech. CSS and JS might be a better model.
Stakeholder management is murky and burdensome
3. How do you hope the design system will help?
Reduce the number of new a11y bugs to less than a quarter of what we generate today
New bugs should only happen where there is new innovation
Produce software that is optimized for everyone with more sophisticated accessibility features
Easy to know what components exist, making it easier to design things based on available patterns. (I would like section of latest updates to the system that I could regularly reference)
…
Let Design lead Engineering to do things right; to have a unified voice, theme and user mode of interaction
Less back and forth between functional areas (design, product, engineering)
4. What about the design system makes you nervous, apprehensive, or skeptical?
Worried that we'll create yet another pattern on top of everything else and fail to unify our interfaces.
…
Design System takes a lot of maintenance - worried about our ability to keep the Design System fresh and evergreen
Divestment because of “shiny object” distraction
5. What does success look like?
Our design system and the products we make with it address the full range of human experience, not just named disabilities.
Going to edx.org, hubspotHubSpot, or wordpressWordPress, or the LMS and seeing consistent look and feel
Paragon working group remains strong and healthy, and fully attended by both Engineering and Design. Having two frontend-oriented engineers dedicate a good chunk of time consistently, and prioritize important problems.
Design system verbal language is common language at edX (component titles, what they do, how they’re used)
6. What do you think a design system should not do, or not attempt to do?
Should not stymie innovation, though shouldn't encourage reinventing things for no reason .
Status colour Red title +2 Should not be all things to all people (at first). UI designers should be the the first audience.
Should not try to be perfect before launching. 80% is good to launch, then iterate after that
7. What’s going to sink this ship? Fast forward a year from now and the design system initiative is a total failure. Why did it fail?
Squads decide it's faster to build things on their own than with the design system.
Lack of cross-functional agreement and prioritization to follow through.
…Lack of investment
8. What questions should we be asking you that we aren’t?
If there are components with no accessible versions available, what do we do?
How will we plan and time engineering effort needed to bring this system to life?
…How can I help drum up the support?
What is it going to take for some teams to realize the full benefit and be totally bought in?
What is a design system?