A collective perspective on design systems: A night out with Pinterest Design
How would you describe design systems in a single word? We asked a room full of designers and got answers like: guidelines, standards, patterns, culture, community.
Community feels like the right word to describe Gestalt, our design system at Pinterest. Through training, events, partnerships, office hours, Slack channels and countless other ways, the team fosters a true spirit of collaboration and connection internally, not to mention how individual team members engage with the broader design systems community outside of Pinterest. Don’t just take our word for it: Gestalt is recognized by peers in the industry for their outstanding collaboration (and documentation, and talks, and articles). [Update: Gestalt won in three categories, including collaboration!]
This October, Pinterest Design hosted an event and conversation with some Gestalt and Design Foundations team members to bring that community-focused mindset to our broader network of New York City–area designers, researchers and content designers. We had a packed house for an intimate evening of food, drinks and conversation in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. You could feel the palpable energy of connection and excitement — these types of in-person meetups have been missed these past few years, and the room pulsed with the energy of happy reunions and new connections.
After a cocktail hour, we opened the floor to a lively discussion about design systems with Rebecca McMillin, who leads our Design Foundations team, and two members of our Gestalt Design System team, Cíntia Romero, Senior Product Designer, and Kate Halvorsen, Staff Product Designer. Our Senior Recruiter Bailey Liu moderated as we welcomed the room of designers to join in the collective discussion. The conversation was far-reaching, from the impact of a strong design system on the business to the importance of designing with accessibility and inclusivity in mind. As you can guess, with a room full of brilliant creatives there were sharp questions, meaningful insights and a few good laughs.
Here are some top takeaways from the conversation:
1. Building meaningful partnerships with cross-functional collaborators is key to design system success
Design systems need engaged partners, and our community wanted to hear about how Gestalt engages not only with designers, but other partners like researchers, engineers and content designers.
Cíntia shared that with Engineering, it’s about growing the partnership through training and keeping channels of communication open (Gestalt has a dedicated Slack channel just for engineers’ questions). She said that because Gestalt has invested time and effort into building relationships with engineers, they’ll often come to them saying, “I don’t know how to build this with Gestalt.” The partnership allows them to work together to solve problems proactively — engineering understands that the design system saves them time, and they want to use it.
With Research and Content Design, Gestalt has built meaningful partnerships through collaborative projects. Gestalt partnered with content designers on the inclusive language standards and partners with researchers on design experiments that offer opportunities to evaluate components and patterns.
When it comes to building strong relationships with designers, Kate shared that when the team gets repeated asks about a feature, they know they need to build that component. Establishing that type of dialogue and delivering on needs has been important for the team. They’ll also proactively reach out to serial detachers and ask them if someone from Gestalt can watch them build a screen to troubleshoot. Sometimes designers detach because they don’t understand how to best use the system, and watching them helps uncover those training gaps and build connections.
2. Knowledge sharing with your network is essential
At the event, it became clear that people were tackling similar projects with similar goals. Our team said design systems peers should lean on each other for knowledge sharing, especially since it’s difficult to find information on very specific but shared problems. For example, mobile components are tricky, and everyone in the design systems community is trying to figure out answers. Events like this one are so valuable because they allow colleagues to talk through problems and hear different angles for approaching solutions.
Kate shared that out-of-the-box solutions for mobile components are not always accessible, but taking the time to shape them to your specific users and use-cases will pay dividends. After the talk, some audience members immediately took the advice to lean on your peers and came up to continue the conversation with Kate about mobile components and learn more.
3. Measuring adoption is always top-of-mind; learn from others to see what works
Design system adoption is always a perennial hot topic within the community and with executives. Rebecca shared insights around how Pinterest measures adoption, including the FigStats tool built by Ravi Lingineni, a design technologist on the Gestalt team. FigStats tracks adoption in handoff files, giving Gestalt insight into low-adopting teams so they can work to train them and prioritize other gaps in the system. Rebecca also shared Gestalt’s methods for surveying the Design and Engineering organizations twice a year to gather a mix of quantitative and qualitative data.
Our team finds these types of exchanges with fellow design community members invaluable. We’re so grateful to Rebecca, Cíntia, Kate and Bailey for leading this forum and for the many New York–area designers for joining us and sharing their perspectives. We look forward to connecting with the design community in multiple cities next year!
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