New York
For our second-ever design systems conference, Schema by Figma went global, making stops in New York, London, and Tokyo, along with a special virtual event. Each city featured a full day of live programming and networking, bringing together a diverse range of speakers, who shared insights and inspiration from their respective design systems practices.
Our first stop was New York. Scroll on to catch up on talks from the event and be sure to also check out the talks from London and Tokyo.
Opening Keynote with Jacob Miller, Product Manager at Figma
As design systems grow and evolve, so does the complexity. With complexity comes the need for newer best practices and adoption of more rigorous controls of our system. What can we as designers learn from other disciplines best practices, and how can we adopt them to ensure that our design systems grow in the right way? Read more of Jacob's thoughts on what we can learn from code.
Designing a community-driven design systems roadmap with Jules Forrest, Director of Product Design at Credit Karma
Roadmaps are a valuable tool in the product development toolkit: they shape a body of work by clearly communicating the projects, priority, and scope required to complete that work. Unfortunately, not every design systems team has the luxury of being staffed like a product development team, with a dedicated PM to drive the roadmap. In this talk, I’ll share how our scrappy design systems team at Credit Karma co-created a design systems roadmap with our internal community to bring confidence, clarity and focus to our work.
Establishing early evangelists: from sentiment gathering to strategic roadmapping with Taylor Cashdan of Hologram
Whether you’re building a design systems program from the ground up, evolving an existing charter, or joining an established team, the best way to build trust with your future consumers, team, and organization is a cross-disciplinary sentiment analysis. And, if done right, the output can become the perfect foundation for an initial set of goals to inform your roadmap. Building this trust early will ensure that you can build the system they want (by delivering the system they need).
Creating DoorDash’s native mobile design system with Camden Asay, Matthew Burg, Ayanna Kosoko, and Will Hou of DoorDash
Designing and building mobile native design systems can be tough. Different devices, different languages, and different conventions can make it challenging to get started and stay consistent. In this talk, the DoorDash design system team will share what they have learned about navigating these challenges: their process, their past mistakes, and how they move forward when building the robust native component library that powers the food delivery app.
Evolving systems with data and heart with Bernadette Faller, Vincent van der Meulen, and Hiroshi Mendoza of Uber
At Uber, we've built a cross-platform design system with hundreds of thousands of weekly Figma inserts and an accompanying super plugin. But like everyone, we started with only a few components and multiple one-off plugins. We've carefully matured our design system through data and heart. Yet it hasn't been straightforward. There's a constant tension between what designers and developers need and how we interpret data. These growing pains only seem to get worse the more a system evolves. In this session, we'll show you that data and heart don't have to be at odds as we share how we mature our design system and plugins. Through demos of AI-driven tooling, we'll explore the role data can play in the future and help your team scale your system by balancing numbers with heart.
Expanding your design system's sphere of influence and other lessons I'm still learning with Lauren LoPrete of Dropbox
Design systems are drivers of cultural change disguised as a component library—getting your org to commit to this change often requires influencing across all levels from designers to VPs. In doing so, you’ll rely on skills like communication and relationship building, in order to expand your system of allies. In this talk, I’ll share mistakes and lessons learned along the way and offer ideas to help you navigate the challenges of design systems buy-in and advocacy.
Inside Figma: Behind the scenes of component properties with Su Yang and Naomi Jung of Figma
Component properties launched at Config earlier this year, but was over a year in the making. Essentially React properties for Figma components, “props” removes the guesswork out of your design system and better aligns design components with code. Join the tech leads of the project for a behind the scenes look into how the feature came together, the power it unlocks for your design system, and a look into some of the exciting updates we’ve made post launch.
Architecting Subcomponents with Nathan Curtis of EightShapes
Playing constant catch up, adding prop after prop to support and maintain too many cases? Break larger components into flexible subcomponents so that users can solve their unique problems themselves. We'll show how to architect subcomponents, leverage Figma's improving component features, embrace opportunities and challenges the approach creates for your system.
Virtual Speaker Panel Q&A
Capping off Schema by Figma 2022, four speakers joined us online for a panel and Q&A to discuss trends and what the future holds for design systems. The panel features Patrycja Rozmus, Hiroshi Mendoza, Nathan Curtis, Lauren LoPrete, and hosted by design advocate Hugo Raymond.
Want more design systems content? Check out this year’s talks from London and Tokyo, and or head to our YouTube channel for 2021 talks. Thank you for joining us!
