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Overview

During my time at Viasat, I was one of a few key designers and developers that worked to create the first iterations of a design system (dubbed "BEAM") that would help combat a growing disparity between products across different business units and verticals. We acted as the central touch-point for an international design team, and established new processes by which our design system was created and maintained. We also worked directly with our developer partners to create a shared implementation language through Storybook, and built this feedback loop into the larger process to promote ongoing collaboration and growth.

Problem statement

Our designers were often divided into different teams that would easily become isolated within their respective projects/areas of the business, and although we collaborated as designers and critiqued work throughout our own projects, we lacked a shared pattern and component library to provide consistency across our suite of products. We saw time and time again that the same problems were being solved differently in different areas, and duplicate design work was not uncommon. We saw that there was an opportunity to improve our team's efficiency by centralizing and sharing our knowledge through clear and consistent design and documentation.

Process

At the time (2019-2020) our design team was using Sketch, and although Figma was a topic of discussion and had been tested by a few designers on the team, we ultimately set up our process to utilize sketch in combination with Abstract to create a git workflow for design file changes, approvals, and review. Our Abstract organization also solved a visibility issue across teams to provide a look into current projects and existing designs that opened the door for sharing knowledge.

We worked directly with front end developers to review designs and components, utilizing an atomic design approach to our system to roll out a shared language for all of our future design work at the company. Working from our "atoms" out, we created the foundations of what would become a robust and multi-themed system that honored the Viasat brand while solving the specific needs of diverse sets of applications.

Results

While I believe we made incredible progress during the time we spent creating the first iteration of BEAM, and I would love to share more details, my ability to share work from Viasat is severely limited by the non-disclosure agreement I signed during my employment. I'd be happy to further discuss the methodologies or techniques I employed during my time on this project but I unfortunately cannot share more detail publicly at this time.