Schema 2022 NYC. Editor updates. Craft.
The recordings from the last month’s Schema conference in New York City are already available. This is a short and quiet Thanksgiving week in the US, so enjoy the opportunity to catch up on great talks about design systems between traveling and eating turkey. The remaining talks from the Virtual Schema conference will be posted on the Design Systems website soon.
— Eugene
Sponsor
How the best mobile banking apps are designed and built
See how iO uses Zeplin to handle design systems and handoff so they can quickly build and deploy high-performing mobile banking apps.
App Updates
Mini-bundle of Editor updates
Marcin Wichary introduces twelve editor improvements. Numeric scaling is the obvious highlight and something many of us have been waiting for, but a new dialog for creating Styles and preserved formatting when copying/pasting text are great too!
International keyboard layouts
This update is a big deal for many folks as well. You can now select from multiple keyboard layout options so that Figma shortcuts are better mapped to your system keyboard.
What’s New
How Figma builds products
Lenny Rachitsky kicked off a new series on building products by interviewing Figma’s CPO Yuhki Yamashita. Learn about their planning process, how they use OKRs, their design review meetings process, org structure, lessons learned, and more in this Twitter thread, or in an excerpt from his subscriber-only newsletter.
A conversation with Figma’s accessibility team
Figma’s accessibility team shares what they’ve learned from the community and their vision for what’s ahead.
Schema by Figma — New York, Oct 26, 2022
Schema 2022 NYC Opening Keynote — Jacob Miller
“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?”
Designing a community-driven design systems roadmap — Jules Forrest
“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 — Taylor Cashdan
“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 — Camden Asay, Matthew Burg, Will Hou, Ayanna Kosoko
“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 #1 food delivery app.”
Evolving systems with data and heart — Uber Team
“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 — Lauren LoPrete
“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 — Su Yang, Naomi Jung
“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 — Nathan Curtis
“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.”
Using Figma
Slot components mistake
Ridd explains why it’s better to think of each container component as having a single slot instead of a bunch of individual slots.
Inner shadows
Vijay is experimenting with inner shadows in Figma. Despite a limit of only 8 shadows, it’s usually enough to create a 3D effect on any shape.
Prototyping paradigms
A Twitch stream of Ana Boyer and Miggi Cardona diving deep into Figma prototyping.
Plugins
Export Smart Animations to GIF
Early beta of a new plugin for exporting Figma animations into a GIF.
Cool Thing
Craft
Loved this article by Paul Stamatiou on elevating product quality. His thoughts on the constant tension of shipping faster vs. shipping better and a promise of iterating are something I’ve been pondering a lot. Paul’s website itself is an inspiring example of a truly personal “homepage” with carefully crafted essays and resources.