This week, we're digging into the Design Systems Podcast archives. Guest host Richard Banfield, VP of Design Leadership at Knapsack, revisits a 2020 conversation between host Chris Strahl and Rick Rodriguez, then Head of Design Systems at Walmart Labs.
Rick shares how his team developed Living Design, Walmart’s internal design system, to support both customer-facing and associate-facing digital products. The conversation explores what it takes to design for scale across a massive enterprise ecosystem, how to navigate legacy technologies while planning for the future, and how to engage people across your organization to drive alignment and adoption.
You’ll also hear about:
- Lessons in contribution, ownership, and iteration within a federated design organization
- The ambassador program that helped evangelize and align teams across the enterprise
- Insights into how data and qualitative feedback drive system decisions — especially around complex components like carousels
Although this conversation originally aired five years ago, the lessons Rick shares remain strikingly relevant. As design systems continue to mature, this episode offers a timeless perspective on scaling thoughtfully, building collaboratively, and evolving with intention.
You can listen to the original episode in full here.
Guesst
Rick Rodriguez is currently a Product Design Manager at Meta, but at the time of our original episode he wast the Head of Design Systems at Walmart Labs. He is an avid runner, hand letterer, and superfan of cappuccinos and donut breaks. You can find Rick on Twitter as @rickrodriguez, and on LinkedIn.
Transcript
Chris Strahl [00:00:00]:
Hi, welcome to the Design Systems Podcast. This is the place where we explore where design development and product overlap, hear from experts about their experiences and the lessons they've learned along the way, and get insights into the latest trends impacting digital product development and design systems from the people who pioneered the industry.
As always, this podcast is brought to you by Knapsack. Check us out at knapsack.cloud.
If you want to get in touch with the show, ask some questions, or tell us what you think, send us a message over on LinkedIn. You can find a direct link to our page in the show Notes. We'd love to hear from you.
Richard Banfield [00:00:26]:
Hey everyone, this is Richard Banfield, VP of Design Leadership at Knapsack. I've taken over the podcast for a few episodes to revisit some of my favorite episodes from the archives. This week, I'd like to play part of an interview that Chris did with Rick Rodriguez from 2020. At the time, Rick was head of Design Systems at Walmart Labs. And while this episode is nearly five years old, the insights Rick brings to the conversation around scale is very applicable today. Maybe even more so.
Before we get into it, I'd like to remind you that Knapsack is hosting Patterns Leadership Summits in Chicago and New York in April and May. These in person events happen every month in cities around the country and they are really good opportunities for leaders to connect with other leaders and learn together. I often joke that these are like group therapy, so if it sounds good to you, consider joining us for one. We'd love to have you.
And we're always announcing new events so you can find all the information you need over at knapsack.cloud/events.
Richard Banfield [00:01:27]:
All right, so in part of the episode I'm going to play for you, Rick and Chris talk about how enterprise organizations are building digital product ecosystems that support both external and internal customer needs and that ultimately creates a unified experience. Rick shares some really good insights into the way his team at Walmart went about testing and iterating to build a design system that meets the current needs of Walmart while also serving teams that are working with legacy technologies. And they were also planning for some future technology. So real convergence of things there. This part of the conversation feels especially relevant today with the rise of automation, AI and of course rapid prototyping. Because of the advances that we have at Knapsack, we've recently launched a new prototyping feature and a user role designed to expand design system adoption.
Richard Banfield [00:02:37]:
So combining these AI ideas with the existing design system foundations, we are hoping that people will start to reshape the digital production cycle. And we're actively exploring how we can do this with a combination of design systems and this latest and greatest technology.
Rick also shares really great strategies for creating an ambassador program to help evangelize the design system within an organization and helps guide those priorities of the design system team to those cross functional members. He talks about how the living design team thinks about contribution, how they think about innovation, and the role of data in determining what makes it into the system and then how to get that system governance set up. We've come a long way in the last five years, of course, since this episode, but the original ideas here are still really, really valid. The ongoing evolution that we're all experiencing is important, but it has to be built on solid foundation. So we believe that these insights from Rick offers some really relevant information that you can use to scale and improve your digital production system and then ultimately create better experiences. So I hope you enjoy listening.
Chris Strahl [00:04:02]:
Hey Rick, it's really great to have you on. Thanks for coming out. We've been talking for about a year about design systems and I'm glad we were able to finally get you on the program.
Rick Rodriguez [00:04:09]:
Definitely, Chris, thanks for having me. Excited to be here.
Chris Strahl [00:04:12]:
So Rick is the senior manager and head of design systems at Walmart Labs. Their design system there is called Living Design. It's this really incredible look at a design system at scale and kind of how Walmart Labs has led this sort of mindshare shift around how they think about digital products. I'd love to kind of understand a little bit about that today and also talk about some of these challenges at these huge scales that Walmart deals with. Kind of just diving right in. Can you talk a little bit about the role that Walmart Labs has inside of Walmart and how like Living Design fits into that?
Rick Rodriguez [00:04:46]:
Definitely. So Walmart Labs is, that's our arm that was really focused on the ecommerce portion and doing a lot of digital work. But within Walmart Labs also is not only what faces our customers, also what faces our associates. So as everyone knows, we have a huge footprint in regards to brick and mortar stores. And with that we have an associate core who need to access tools and they do that digitally, either with provided devices, wearables or scanners, as well as bring your own device. You're using an Android or an iPhone and those devices need apps to run. So our labs teams also provide product design for those services as well. In addition to then we think about customers and the customer base of the apps and website access.
Chris Strahl [00:05:25]:
So it's really comprehensive. You both look at the internal ecosystem as well as the customer ecosystem and how you build like the right digital products for both of those audiences completely.
Rick Rodriguez [00:05:35]:
And the focus is really customer grade. We don't want to say there is a certain set of tools for one group versus another. It's really one set of tools for all.
Chris Strahl [00:05:42]:
Yeah. We actually talk a lot about the idea of the consumerization of enterprise and the notion that, you know, really with the advent of things like the iPhone and pervasiveness of the Internet, people are demanding an at work experience that is of the same quality and design caliber of their personal experience. And it's cool to hear that you guys embrace that thinking.
Rick Rodriguez [00:06:00]:
Yeah, definitely. Because it has a lot of different impacts. One from how do you onboard somebody on day one? And it should be intuitive and if we approach it from any customer in a universal design, then that means we're accounting for all the different factors, whether it's somebody who already has experience and we can account for the fact that most people have a smartphone, they're using apps already. How do we make it just feel natural so that they can jump into their workflow and really start? And that impact both affects the associates happiness as again day one, how they feel going into their new job, but also as the provider inside internally. How do we get people trained up quickly? How do we get them into a flow so that then they start to have impacts a lot sooner and customer grade tools help to enable that.
Chris Strahl [00:06:41]:
Gotcha. So talk to me about how your design system plays into this. I know it's called living design. How does that help enable this idea of this seamless transition from personal life to work or from being outside of Walmart as a customer to inside Walmart as a customer?
Rick Rodriguez [00:06:57]:
Sure. So funny enough, Living design, just as it sounds, it's an ever evolving system, completely organic in the sense of as we learn and take new inputs, we're able to kind of spread and permeate a little bit further out into the org. The first iteration of it actually launched several years back with a brand new redesign of the website. And the design team at that point was already thinking scale and they were thinking about modularity. How do we have more plug and play and give our teams beyond just UI but also engineering, give them more tools from the back end. And that was very customer focused. And up until these last several iterations of it, we're on our third version right now. In the midst of getting preparing that that version still was very customer focused, but in the midst of that happening last year we made an effort to now really look to extend how do we get this to go to the associate side as well.
Rick Rodriguez [00:07:45]:
And again, that came really more from a leadership, so a top down mindset of hey, we need to have this customer grade experience really extend beyond just our customers that are outside the ecosystem. And so inside it became a team effort. And so over the course of the last four or five months that's been our focus.
Chris Strahl [00:08:01]:
That's awesome. I love the idea of it going from being this very customer driven, customer centric, bottom up, like, hey, let's start with tooling that really helps our dev teams. Let's start with tooling that really helps build this really awesome customer experience. And now it's transitioned to being that the organizational leadership values as a tool to create this sort of unified experience across not just customers, but the entire Walmart ecosystem.
Rick Rodriguez [00:08:24]:
Yeah, definitely. And this isn't the first effort. There's been a lot of efforts in the past. There was one that aligned very closely with material design in Google, especially on the associate side, so that they could enable faster development, faster design, faster learning. And I think what that became was its own version aside from the customer experience living design version. So now we're looking at it from a little bit more connected and related system so that it's not purely reliant on Google material, which is fine. Material design is amazing and it allows you to start up quickly. But now as a truly enterprise solution, we're looking at to do it internally with our own design system style of living design.
Chris Strahl [00:09:01]:
That brings up a really good point. Right? There's lots of larger enterprises that have a high degree of scale and complexity that end up with a lot of fragmentation inside of their design system. I wouldn't say that they're worse off, but there's definitely this idea of like, hey, we've, we've kicked the fragmentation can down the road and now instead of 200 different applications, each with their own sort of design and code, we have a handful, half a dozen, say, design systems that all manage different aspects of that. You guys have kind of taken a bit of a different approach here in that you've basically said we're going to have living design and that is going to be the place that we kind of push back against that fragmentation challenge. Can you talk a little bit about that and how you kind of manage all of these different interconnected layers that exist inside of it? Because I can imagine that the complexity of something like this across thousands of stores and hundreds of thousands of people or millions of people depending on the customer base that you're looking at. That's a lot to manage. So how do you look at that from this fragmentation perspective and this interconnectedness?
Rick Rodriguez [00:10:01]:
Really the way we look at Living Design is that's our shared language. And so if we think about it from a language standpoint, how do we extend the same conversations that are happening whether designers in the room or not and even beyond design? Because the belief from myself and within our team is that it goes so much further than just design. It actually is code. And when it lives in code, then that's the actual part that we have working out in the world. Also having a clearer understanding of that ecosystem you mentioned a little bit earlier, the size. I didn't realize the massive scale at which Walmart was operating until I was inside, for lack of a better term, the belly of the beast. In that there's so many arms and branches, whether it's a marketing program, whether it's an associate program, whether it's a customer kind of flow for e commerce program and all these different services that serve that. So it's really accounting for platforms, it's accounting for code bases, it's accounting for established silos of years of development that now we look at it, how do we kind of start to soften some of those edges and break down some of those silos? And it's not there yet.
Rick Rodriguez [00:11:02]:
We're still working at finding that right kind of rhythm as to how much code can be shared, how much UI can be shared. There's different needs from an associate who may be working on a desktop with a dedicated workstation, versus a customer who's just picking up an iPad or a mom at four in the morning with a phone in her hand and only baby in the other hand. How do we account for those kinds of experiences? So Living Design is trying to take info and data to understand that better and then apply it in the specific way it needs to be applied.
Chris Strahl [00:11:30]:
Can you help us try to understand some of this stuff about scale? What were some of the things that when you did get into that belly, you really saw as an eye opening idea of what scale really meant at the Walmart side of things? Give us a better sense of what changed your point of view on that?
Rick Rodriguez [00:11:46]:
Sure. And even a little bit of background in that I worked with the subsidiary Jet.com prior to coming onto the Walmart team and having launched the design system there, and working with a 10 person team, I had a lot of access to making sure that people could follow styles and sketch libraries. So that was quite easy. However, then when we look into going forward into the Walmart system, we're talking now 200 plus designers as part of an organization that are creating design. So how does a team be able to extend and have scalability? I think what then you start to look at are the different places that you can have impacts which are understanding platforms they're designing for and seeing all these different roads that people take to launch design to production code. And so having a better understanding of that has helped us to kind of make better decisions as to how do we quickly enable some of these first iterations.
Chris Strahl [00:12:33]:
Yeah. So what are some of the trade offs that exist there? Because I can imagine in some of our prior conversations thinking about like you know, a quote unquote small line of business for Walmart as something that is dramatically larger than even most medium sized enterprises out in the world. How do you overcome these challenges that allow you to focus on that scalability?
Rick Rodriguez [00:12:53]:
I think it's just being agile and being able to move quickly to learn. It's really adopting this, you know, this mindset. As soon as we can get something out, we'll do our best to then learn from it, iterate upon it and really adopt that iterative kind of cycle of going through. This is V1, this is V1 1, this is V1 2. And you just kind of go through that cycle. We're still learning that process because like many other businesses, especially at a larger scale, it's quite waterfall. Right. And it's hard to enable that agility to go to smaller thinking, smaller teams.
Rick Rodriguez [00:13:25]:
But as we start to make shifts along with the industry, as we all have, you start to understand that you have to. It's not even a, it's not a should, it's a must to be able to do things in smaller pieces, learn from it and then put it out into the world.
Chris Strahl [00:13:37]:
Yeah, I love that. I love the idea that you guys have this future vision that's out there where you think about scalability in respect to design systems of that reuse and that common set of either starting points or points to grow from that allow you to really present your scale or create a more sustainable set of scale.
Richard Banfield [00:13:58]:
Yeah.
Rick Rodriguez [00:13:58]:
And it's an understanding as well that it's not going to match. There are pieces to this puzzle that are going to be mismatched or designed in a different kind of way. So if you take just like a platform, a platform standpoint, different platforms in store, which may have more legacy or outdated technology, but it's in store. Right. It's there. It's hard, physical.
Chris Strahl [00:14:15]:
Is that like a kiosk or something?
Rick Rodriguez [00:14:16]:
Yeah. So it would be like a kiosk. It might be scanners, it might be wearables that were purchased at bulk in order to enable inventory scan. So there's systems that are there that a lot of times those have lead times of six months to a year. So how do you make sure that you can account for that along with the systems that are newer, that are adopted quicker so that you can, you know, kind of serve both sides and many times you can't. So it's just really making the right compromises in the right places.
Chris Strahl [00:14:39]:
Gotcha. So you could almost see this, like this landscape where, you know, you're not just thinking about what is happening in three years. You're also talking about how you take year plus old technology and bring it up to today. And the challenges that you have, I assume, balancing that are with this eye towards the future of what's possible and what's enabled by new digital technology and new digital applications, while at the same time being mindful and aware of the fact that you have all of the support for all these legacy systems that are out there. I envision some insane grand dashboard or something like that that has a look at these things. How do you get your arms around that sort of problem?
Rick Rodriguez [00:15:16]:
Yeah, well, luckily we have teams of designers that have that expertise. And the way that our design systems team sits, we are centralized, but we try to use a hybrid model of having distributed ambassadors that sit within these teams that have ownership of their domain and have the data to make those kind of decisions and then come back to help us inform what could impact the design system.
Chris Strahl [00:15:36]:
Yeah. So tell me a little bit more about those people. Their role is to basically evangelize, facilitate, spread the doctrine of design systems across the organization. How did you come up with that and who are the people that do that sort of work?
Rick Rodriguez [00:15:50]:
Yeah, definitely. It was one of those ideas where again, you're thinking of scale. How can you make sure that you're getting the thoughts aligned, that you're getting the practices aligned, the processes understood, and that you do have people who evangelize for you. Those are the people on the ground. And before everything happened with COVID and a lot of the, we were still doing traveling and able to go into an office. Myself and another teammate ended up doing a research trip out to Bentonville where a lot of our associate product teams sit. And we just researched and asked questions and surveyed and said, hey, who's Doing what? And what do you have? And like most design systems that are, again, larger scale, we found that there's already many subsystems that are happening. There are teams that have their own subsystems.
Rick Rodriguez [00:16:28]:
So those designers who are leading those efforts became our ambassadors. And so now we lead weekly ambassador chats about the things they're doing and how they can share their tools across with other teams. And so those people really became our evangelists to get out the word and say, hey, this is how we should be doing it. And they continue to learn with us. So they really are the advocates for living design.
Chris Strahl [00:16:48]:
That's amazing. I love the idea of taking what ostensibly was a research project and using that almost as a recruiting and evangelism tool to identify the champions or the leaders inside of the organization that are really focused on change and then deputizing them. You have this democratization of your design system point of view that way.
Rick Rodriguez [00:17:09]:
Definitely. And there's always the quotes like design systems are for people and design systems are unique to each organization. And those statements are completely true. So I think it's important, as design system leaders, those of us who are making decisions for our systems that others are going to use to understand. How are systems understood? Are they understood at all? And what are some of the things we need to put in place to get the system to a place where it's helpful and that people feel that they have a piece of it. Because without that ownership portion, you just don't get the contribution model that you need, especially at a scale again of. I have a team of seven people that are doing updates to sketch libraries and documentation as well as office hours. But we're serving 200 plus designers that are creating design every single day.
Rick Rodriguez [00:17:53]:
So how do we do that in the most effective way possible?
Chris Strahl [00:17:55]:
Yeah. That's awesome that you can have a team that is 1 20th or less the size of the group that you serve and that scales throughout the organization.
Richard Banfield [00:18:06]:
Yeah.
Rick Rodriguez [00:18:06]:
And it's about building trust. Because if you build a tool that people use and it breaks their art boards and it breaks their flow and they're not able to continue to move forward, then that's a huge factor into itself. So it's a really, it's a lot of discipline on multiple sides.
Chris Strahl [00:18:19]:
So thinking about that contribution model, you know, when you, you look at your design system as this, you know, democratized thing that is across the organization, obviously what goes down is important, but what comes back up is also probably really important. How do you guys view that contribution and how do you kind of, you Know, allow people to own their piece of the design system and then share it with others.
Rick Rodriguez [00:18:40]:
Yeah. So we started to really look at a lot of different models that are out in the market. So why reinvent the wheel? And I know a lot of fanfare was given to Spotify and their approach with Encore as a system from where you have a base layer, which are the things that, you know, you can share at subatomic levels or design tokens. And as you start to work up that atomic level, that there are certain areas where you can actually break and say, you know, at this point we'll own this to here and this in another area we may, you know, kind of start to share. And yet in another area we'll give up ownership altogether. So if you look at atomic design from subatomic levels through atoms, design systems, teams own, so that's really where we can start to really put guidelines and patterns together for people to reference. And then when you start to look at some molecules into organisms, that's where we say there's a shared understanding. Things that we know that most teams are going to need and we can help inform, but we may not own.
Rick Rodriguez [00:19:30]:
We use others who have expertise, and then we go from organisms up to templates and pages. That's really the domain ownership that uses user data based on this is a search team, this is a CART team, this is a homepage team, and those teams can really inform and have their own ownership. So in that model, that at least starts to set some lines in the sand as to, like, who's doing what and when. And then it just comes down to process and communication. You know, are we getting that word out? And do people understand how to, how to implement?
Chris Strahl [00:19:57]:
Gotcha. So almost as that, that complexity continuum increases, the ownership level or the control from the centralized team decreases. There's almost an inverse relationship between what you feel like you have to own and control relative to the complexity of that implementation.
Rick Rodriguez [00:20:14]:
Definitely, because you can look at it in one perspective, we're going to be an authoritarian design system and we will give you the things you need and you must build with it. But we took another aspect, which was we want this to be a little bit more free. We want it to be an innovative space, and we don't want design systems to be the scapegoat for why somebody couldn't innovate upon a product idea that they had. So the way that we felt we can enable that was let's own the smallest pieces, the pieces that don't need to be renegotiated. Every single time. Take that out of the hands. And that allows our feature designers and feature teams to really think about the bigger story. Because at the core of all of our work is really about the customer, and the customer either being internal or external, how do we serve when they're searching for an item, or how do we serve when they're looking for a data table? And that's really the core as to what we're trying to solve.
Rick Rodriguez [00:20:58]:
So we try to remove the design system piece at its core level, away from that, and then we provide the tools to answer questions as feature designers and teams are working through their solutions.
Chris Strahl [00:21:09]:
Yeah, I love that as a philosophy and I also like that you brought up innovation. So when you think about innovation, one of the things that we don't talk a lot about in the design systems realm, but it's kind of one of the potentially future promises, potentially now promises, is the ability to share innovation from product to product to product. So, you know, the idea of a design system is like, let's create a bunch of reuse, which is awesome. But if you have a contribution model that is taking those things that are happening at the end points of the design system and bringing them back to the core, that's innovation that gets then shared across every single product in the ecosystem. And I think that that sharing of innovation is something that is, I mean, at least right now, somewhat of a nascent benefit to design systems. Do you guys really find a lot of value in that innovation sharing? And is that something that's happening right now?
Rick Rodriguez [00:21:53]:
You know, it's starting to kick off. It's one of those efforts where we've been in that older model of certain teams owning a specific thing. And that thing, if it doesn't work exactly the same way on another products team, they'll take the core base and then they'll add to it and they'll modify it. And now there becomes 5, 10, 15, 20 instances of the same thing. So in the newest version that we've been working through, the whole concept was a frame. And so you find a frame of something and that frame is really just. I think a perfect example of this kind of component might be a carousel. With a carousel, the design systems team will help establish on mobile, you want to make sure you have two and a peak or X and a peak of the next to indicate it's a carousel.
Rick Rodriguez [00:22:29]:
It could be swiped, but what's in those buckets that get swiped is really up to the feature team. So let us create the frame for it and provide that to you, so you can use the same one and every team thereafter uses the exact same frame, but your content that flows through it, that's on you. That's really up to you to decide if it's a product tile, if it's an image, if it's a card, and then you can do your own innovation within that using core components.
Chris Strahl [00:22:53]:
Yeah, I love that. I think that that's. Yeah, I appreciate you picking the carousel as potentially one of the more controversial components that exist. Right. The, the idea of, you know, do you use a carousel and, and should you use a carousel is oftentimes backed up by a lot of skeptics. And those skeptics are typically like, well, the hard part about a carousel is what defines a carousel. And by basically saying we're going to lay down the rules of what defines a carousel, it creates some scope around it that I think is, is kind of pushing back against that skepticism.
Rick Rodriguez [00:23:24]:
Yeah, we just finished a sprint that actually focused on what that exact layout would you just kind of mention, which is what is a carousel, what does it impact, how are people using it, what things are carousels and what are not and what should we own as the frame and what becomes a little bit more open ended as a feature and kind of set within that team. So we were able to identify four or five different specific uses of a carousel that could be kind of reused as a frame and how it scales from native and then into a mobile web and then up into a desktop view. And understanding that there is a kind of a responsive view to those and how do we use breakpoints to our advantage as well as how do we get the most basic level and we have some very basic principles. Things like if there's business logic, it's not a core component, business logic instantly becomes ownership of that team. Right.
Chris Strahl [00:24:07]:
Because it's an opinionated implementation at that point.
Rick Rodriguez [00:24:09]:
Exactly. And it's based on business needs or possible customers information that we just don't, we're not privy to.
Chris Strahl [00:24:15]:
Right.
Rick Rodriguez [00:24:15]:
But we're looking for is from a visual standpoint, maintaining visual standards, from a convention standpoint, maintaining interactions. Also platform optimization, things that you're looking for in a swipe, things you're looking for in a tap, things you're looking for in a click or a hover. So we want to maintain those. So again, smaller stories that have been pre negotiated so that feature teams can look at bigger stories.
Chris Strahl [00:24:34]:
Gotcha. I assume you're even looking at things like performance optimization and accessibility and all these other sort of not as readily visible to A lot of users, I guess.
Rick Rodriguez [00:24:44]:
Guardrails, definitely. And that's one of the things that a design systems team, because we're working at a much lower level, very basic and kind of framed, we're looking at the foundational level. We want to think about accessibility so that that becomes at the forefront. Accessibility is not a check on the to do list. It's part of good design. So how do you make sure you're enabling feature designers to think about accessibility at their level without having to think about it at our level. And then from a speed latency is one of those issues that you never want to have a high loading spinners. You don't want skeletons, if at all, but when you need them, obviously then there's a case for that.
Rick Rodriguez [00:25:20]:
However, we want to enable the quickest way for people to be able to get code on screen and loaded.
Chris Strahl [00:25:25]:
I also love the idea of sitting down and trying to pick four or five use cases for a carousel across an entire ecosystem of products like that. Seems like definitely an entire sprint to try to figure that out. I recall we were doing interface inventory. I won't say who it was for necessarily, but over a period of weeks we were talking about a major enterprise customer that was looking at at their carousels. And I think that we had something like 27 different use cases for it. And so I can't even imagine trying to pick three or four. That has got to be a daunting task.
Rick Rodriguez [00:25:56]:
Yeah. And as we did our comp analysis and we're looking at other major design systems, you don't see any other major design system even approaching putting the carousel into. Because, you know, again, there are different impacts and there's different ways you want to approach it. Our approach was definitely in the mindset of we have identified that teams are using this this way and we've seen it, you know, consistently throughout. And this is not even in the new design or, you know, it's in legacy designs. You can see this carousel, especially in E Comm. So we have the benefit of knowing that we're in a very unique kind of genre of site. So we can say their customers are looking for carousels.
Rick Rodriguez [00:26:27]:
Right. And at least on the customer side, so they at least understand what it is they're seeing, whether it's part of a personalized list, whether it's part of a group, an order that they've just made, whether it's part of search results. So there's different ways that we could kind of go down that path of saying this is what we see as A base frame. And in doing so again, it's is going to come into learning. Maybe it doesn't work. Maybe once code teams are trying to implement, it doesn't work. And then we blow it up and we take another swing.
Chris Strahl [00:26:53]:
So that automatically makes my mind think about how do you gather data about the success or the effectiveness of the four or five different patterns that you identified? And so what is it that backstops the decision making there? Is there analytics? Is there data that informs the efficacy of these across an eCommerce platform? I think that by the way, it's wonderful that you're able to make some assumptions about your user base based on the fact that you have an understanding of your space and presumably that's grounded in data as well. How do you ground these decisions around what patterns, what interaction models are actually working?
Rick Rodriguez [00:27:30]:
Yeah, definitely. So part of the research portion, as we go back and look at legacy and what carousels existed and how many iterations of them, as we see we had a core system that was being built upon as feature teams needed it, they would take it, they would add code to it and then they would put it back into the library. And so now you have a new iteration. So although that's a bad practice, it's actually helped us in at least identifying. Well, if it's being done this many times, that means it's something that's wanted, right? People are doing it in a certain kind of way. Yeah, definitely. And so that's the first thing is you're looking at usage. So how many times is it being implemented across how many pages or screens or flows is it being implemented in? Then you look at variation, how many times is it being varied and put some nuance specific to the product.
Rick Rodriguez [00:28:10]:
And then I think it gets into tooling, which is one of those hard parts as to how do you measure a design system, its efficacy. And I think what we would look for kind of like those first two, right. Variation as well as implementation. And then the numbers themselves I think are going to be the part that always a little bit more. It's a foggier kind of territory that you get into because I don't think as a design systems team, we don't have that tooling platform yet. But I think it's going to be an evolution because the one thing that I would say would be more on the qualitative end would be the feedback that we're getting from engineers. What do our tickets look like, what kind of office hours, you know, when we, when we have a topic and we're able to track that topic. You know, what do those questions look like? And a lot of times that gives us a different kind of insight that you're going to get from quantitative information.
Chris Strahl [00:28:53]:
I think that that balance of, you know, how do I get some real numbers about use and then also how do I get some, some qualitative understanding about efficacy based on stuff that may be, I guess the right word would be like a little bit hidden behind the things that people are saying. I think that's a really awesome way of gathering data about, about your design system.
Rick Rodriguez [00:29:11]:
Yeah. And the ultimate goal would be to get a lot more quantitative where you're saying how many swipes did this carousel get to? What number of product did a customer get to? And we know that there's, in studies of carousels, the effectiveness of a carousel drops off after that peak. Right. So you're going to see item one, you're going to see item two and you'll see a part of the item three. If a user gets to. If you say I have 12 Macs in a carousel getting to 12, how many swipes did it take? How long were they there for? You start looking at heat mapping of a screen. We know that there's a drop off. So I think it really would be, especially from an E Comm standpoint we are tracking are people clicking into item one or two knowing that those are the items that need to be the best in some format, Are they clicking? Are they adding to cart? We can start to track through that.
Rick Rodriguez [00:29:53]:
And so it is a little bit of detective work, but I think it's important detective work.
Richard Banfield [00:30:04]:
That was a really great conversation between Chris and Rick and I love how much of it still applies today. So what should we take away from this when thinking about scaling enterprise design systems and digital production at large? I think the first thing is that design systems aren't just about component libraries, they're about ecosystems. Successful systems don't just serve designers and developers or engineers. They create a scalable, efficient tooling system for all of the digital production teams. And that could include PM's, and marketing folks across a lot of different internal and external roles.
Secondly, the iteration and adaptability of a design system are really key. Rick shared how his team at Walmart balanced supporting legacy technology while still planning for the future, which I'm sure a lot of us are doing. That's an important reminder that no system is ever truly done right. It's always in flux. Continuous testing, learning or feedback and then refining will make that design system stay relevant.
Richard Banfield [00:31:01]:
The final thing that we found out in this episode was that scaling isn't just a technology problem. It's more than that. It's a people problem. Rick's insights into ambassador programs and the governance show us that the successful adoption of anything, really, but specifically of design systems and digital platforms, depends on advocacy, depends on education, and it depends on how well you can do that community building within your organization.
Well, I hope you've enjoyed it. I certainly did, and thank you for listening. We'll see you next time.
Chris Strahl [00:31:43]:
Hey everyone, thanks for listening to another episode of the Design Systems Podcast. If you have any questions, topic suggestions, or want to share feedback, go ahead and reach out to us on LinkedIn. Our profile is linked in the show Notes. As always, the podcast is brought to you by Knapsack. Check us out at knapsack.cloud. Have a great day, everyone.