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cool next up is Jules she's working at Credit Karma and the first time I met Jules was two years ago and she did a design systems talk when she was at at the Fignon office and so now it's incredibly happy to have her here now at the keynote stage so another warm applause for her hello I'm Jules I'm the Design Systems Manager at Credit Karma and I want to talk today about naming design systems so Credit Karma was founded in 2007 and its mission is to make financial progress possible for everyone I joined in 2017 as the first Design Systems designer and like any other Design Systems designer I started with the product audit the team had been super focused on rolling out new tools and features and without a design system to hold everything together things got a little fragmented we're mostly focused on desktop web but we had some mobile web experiences also because this is the Design Systems talk I'm obligated to show you how many different kinds of buttons we had but the thing that stood out to me most was our an accessible product color palette the first problem was that the colors basically only lived in something called galaxy CSS our internal CSS library since the designers didn't have access to github at the time the name galaxy CSS was totally meaningless to them I wanted the color work to be the first step in bringing the design and engineering teams closer together so I set about researching a shared name we could all rally behind after digging into it I learned there were two distinct approaches to naming Design Systems there were utilitarian design systems names and then there were fun design systems names and then within fun design systems names I noticed there are two different subsets what I think of as aspiration names and then also punny names so here are a few examples of utilitarian design systems names utilitarian design systems names often have the name of the company in the system name often have the words design or system they often make a specific reference to the interface itself or the word language now I did this research a couple of weeks ago but in 2017 when I started out this type of list would have read to me as extremely dry in the aspirational category there are some patterns as well we see a lot of space names a lot of scientific names biology names physics names academic names names around creating things you would use to paint or build or design the key thing about most of the names in this category is that they're not necessarily specific to the company that makes the system finally there are punny system names names that wink at the name of the company its culture or the industry it's in it's important to note here that a lot of the publicly available design systems fall into the second two categories if you're googling around for design systems naming inspiration these types of names in the second two categories come up a lot I eventually ended up taking the fun aspirational approach at Credit Karma I was conscious of the fact that I was a new designer at a well-established company and that my work could disrupt processes that were already in place I thought a playful name would help rally everybody around our new way of designing so I landed on the name thread shout-out to anyone who works at plaid I think yours is called threads coincidence I promise in my head thread worked on two levels on the one hand it'd be the material we'd use to stitch together bits of reusable UI to make a product experience and on the other hand it would also be this initiative that would stitch together our design Engineering teams I got a volunteer from our front-end infrastructure team to join me on this effort and we got to work after a few months we are ready to ship our first release included a sketch library of symbols and for every symbol there was a matching react component in our react library thread launch at the beginning of 2018 and things were going super well we went on a mini Roadshow visiting different team meetings finding pilot projects but after a few quarters things kind of stalled out by the start of 2019 I did not have such a rosy feeling about threads there had been a shift in the scope of the system on the design side I tackled our visual attributes and components and I was gearing up to start on the meteor problems of interaction patterns there we go and page layouts but on the engineering side bandwidth to work on thread had dried up thread for engineers provided reusable atomic react components but that was it I wasn't gonna stop growing the system on the design side but the name thread was starting to mean different things to different functions which became super confusing the design team also changed quite a bit in 2017 when I started we were 10 people on the design team and a year and a half later we'd grown to 35 the system name made sense to those who were already on the team when the system was launched but it was confusing for new teammates in her book expressive design systems you see Mia Perez Cruz talks a lot about what goes into good component naming she cautions teams that metaphorical component names while memorable can be tough to scale they make sense to the teams that create them but onboarding new people can bring a lot of friction I would argue that the same thing is true for design systems names I was spending way too much time talking about the name of the system and explaining the nuance of the name between the design and engineering teams instead of growing the system itself or at least talking about the value of having one most importantly there was a company-wide shift in focus on to our native apps and I just spent a year building a web design system now fortunately a lot of the atomic components like buttons and cards and inputs could drop naturally into our native designs but there were other holes so I knew I had to reprioritize our roadmap to address the shift so while I was working on that in the background I was having a lot of conversations with folks that went something like this should we use thread for this project and I'd be like of course you should and they would be like but we don't have thread on native right and I'd be like well not code wise but you should still use the thread design and they'd be like what even is thread and I'd be like well originally and they'd very politely interrupt me and say we can't use thread that's just a web thing clearly the system wasn't working as well as I'd hoped and there were a lot of factors that went into that but the name was definitely not helping so I started to brainstorm what would a better name look like for us it would need to be immediately understood I wanted to spend as little time as possible explaining the name of the system and more time talking about its value I also wanted it to be inclusive of the system's cross-disciplinary audience I noticed that the term Design Systems could make certain people tune out because they just heard oh this is a specialized thing for the design team and it needed to be self reinforcing I wanted the name to literally reflect the system's purpose eventually I found my litmus test for a new name in the form of the following question should we use system name for this project it was a question I had heard a lot about thread I realized we needed to pick a name that would encourage people from all slices of the company to say yes to this question after some more research I realized that the lift Design Systems team had a system name that checked all my boxes and it's formula could be applied to Credit Karma perfectly I decided to rebrand thread for designers as the Karma product language karma because it's specific to us and our company product because it's inclusive of the entire team that makes the product not just the designers and language because languages are all-encompassing but also always evolving if you work at Credit Karma and you're part of building the product it's a lot harder to say no to this question so I got a deck together to make my case for the new system named and presented it on our next product All Hands I made sure the next installment of our Design Systems newsletter included an overview of the changes I updated the names of all the skeleton sketch files and projects and abstract that we are on figma now I created a new slack channel for people to talk about the system and I created a separate design documentation website to house all of our design dogs now I wish I had some really impressive stats to convince you all how fantastically successful this decision was but measuring design systems would be a whole other lightning talk I can tell you anecdotally that the understanding of the system's purpose went up I'm confusion went down and that the engineering team decided to reinvest its efforts in supporting the design system and that our Executive Committee funded our headcount to grow 200 percent from one designer to three we're all here today if you want to say hi there's a lot more to say about naming design systems but for now if you're thinking about how to name your own system here are some things to consider when canning your Tillet arian design system name make sense when the company is still building its design muscle if you don't have the design founder like Credit Karma didn't when the size of the team using the system is growing rapidly because metaphors can be hard to scale or when the size of the team maintaining the system is very small like ours was on the other hand when a system has both external and internal users like maybe Shopify Polaris you might want to brand the system like you would any other product the same holds true if you're thinking of publishing your system publicly maybe for recruiting or one design or internal branding as a strong part of the company's DNA which I know to be true for Spotify as new design system suite encore again fund names are really common approaches for public design systems but what works well for a public and mature design system may not scale down well to a system when you're just starting out when your system is new or small your bandwidth is an extremely limited resource and you may not have the luxury of spending lots of time on system branding of course the culture of the company plays a huge role in the decision and there is no one-size-fits-all formula that works for everyone or every team in her book Design Systems all Acoma Tova says without a shared language a group of people can't create effectively together whatever approach you take to naming your design system if you can effectively work the name into the language and culture of your team you'll be on the right track thank you you