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Rant: My team spent 6 months building a design system that nobody used
I work at a mid-sized SaaS company in Portland. Last spring our design team of 5 people decided we needed a proper design system. We spent 6 months documenting every button, card, and input field. We made a 200 page site with examples and code snippets. Launched it with a big email and Slack announcement. A month later I checked the analytics and only 3 people from our 40 person product team had even clicked on it. The developers kept copying old patterns from previous projects. The designers said it was too hard to find things. Felt like a huge waste of time. Has anyone else had a design system rollout that just flopped? What did you do differently the second time around?
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reeseanderson2d ago
Wait, only 3 people clicked on it? That's brutal, honestly. I'm sitting here trying to picture the Slack announcement getting one lonely thumbs up reaction and nothing else. Like, did you guys do any user testing before the big launch or just hope people would magically know where everything was?
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adamcoleman2d ago
3 lonely thumbs up reactions" - maybe the real problem was nobody asked the devs what they actually wanted first.
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