Atlas Design System

I was brought on to help Diligent, a 1000+ person B2B SaaS company, evaluate their agency-produced design system. Earlier in the year, Atlas had been delivered to help increase their design and technical efficiency at scale. Unfortunately the Sketch Library that was produced couldn’t be implemented by the design teams, nor properly inspected by the engineering teams. I was brought on to review the Sketch Library, make software recommendations and build out the system in a way that enabled Diligent to start rolling out Atlas by the end of the year.

Understand Diligent product line

Diligent software enables boards of directors from all different types of companies to complete their tasks via secure online tools. I reviewed all the documents that were delivered by the agency. I completed product tasks on Diligent’s Web and iOS platforms to learn and understand their different products and common user flows via each user persona.

evaluate atlas

I read through meeting notes from the design and development teams to understand what issues they were having. I spoke directly with the designers in the New York and New Zealand offices on their specific issues. This was very helpful in letting them get to know me as I got to know them, which built trust and allowed knowledge sharing.

Current Tools: Sketch, DSM & Zeplin

Given the design debt and the need to start Atlas rollout within the year, Sketch was the application of choice for the near future. (Tools like Figma will be evaluated in the new year).

The tool chosen to create the monument site, Design System Manager (DSM) from InVision, didn’t work as expected. The biggest issue: when a designer dragged a component into her local Sketch file, it would bring in 20 other symbols, making the local Sketch file unusable.

The way in which the Sketch components were built prevented the engineering team to inspect via Zeplin. One standout problem was the use of Sketch color symbols instead of layer styles.

Chosen Tools: Sketch, Sketch for teams & Zeplin

Given the need to stay with Sketch, I chose to leverage Sketch’s internal tool set: Text Styles and Layer Styles. The original Atlas file did not take into account how these styles needed to be constructed in order to build out the system. The newly released Sketch for Teams was used for version control and component releases to the design team. We kept Zeplin for developer handoff - utilizing the newly released Global Style Guides feature.

Build out

We are using semantic versioning, releasing simultaneously to designers and developers via a confluence release log and notifying everyone via Slack. We are on track to deliver all rebuilt components for web and iOS by the end of the year.