Introduction:

The Nord Design System, a comprehensive framework for design and code architecture, was first introduced in February 2021. In this interview with Ariel Salminen in the design systems guide, we learn about the 3 year evolution of the Nord System - transitioning from foundational work to shipping usable Web Components.

From a solo effort of establishing the foundations, to a fully-fledged system with a multidisciplinary team providing modular tools across 10 Node.js packages, a Figma toolkit, and themes. With it adopted by roughly 60% of Nordhealth's products, Ariel emphasized balancing creative freedom and consistency, collaborating transparently with product teams, and advocating for the system's impact.

Key points:

• Track adoption metrics, but also qualitative feedback on the system's usefulness

• Automation and AI tools are leveraged to generate documentation, run tests, etc.

• Focus on solving "people problems", not just creating processes/tools

• Design systems are about making it easy for teams to adopt and integrate into workflows

Hihglights:

"One of our team's core principles is to automate everything we can. We value the time of our colleagues, users, and our future selves over our own so we are always proactively looking for ways to automate repetitive tasks and testing."

Tools and processes are often overrated, while the people aspect gets underrated. You can have the most beautiful design system and still have no one adopt it because you've ignored that design systems are mostly trying to solve a people problem.