I have always thought of instructional design as a specific type of user experience design. As such, I constantly look to the Ux and web dev communities for inspiration in improving how we work as instructional designers. After attending several An Event Apart conferences and following the work of world-class designers like Brad Frost and Dan Mall for a few years, I had an opportunity to advocate for the creation of a design system for use within our office.
In 2019 our marketing manager was considering an update of our office’s forward-facing website. At the time, she was unfamiliar with the concept of a design system or why one might be useful for us. I took this opportunity to lean on the work of the aforementioned designers to help her understand how a design system can help with efficiency, consistency, and reliability across all of the web content our office creates. She enthusiastically bought into this vision, and together we pursued a request for proposals (RFP) for the development of a design system for our office.
After the RFP process, the fine team at Sparkbox was selected as our partner in developing our design system. Since its completion in early 2020, the design system has been a boon for helping our instructional design team create web content. It has also been adopted by a few other web creators across campus to help support the design of their sites. We are working on governance structures and collaborative support of the project, and in the almost two years since its launch we have added a handful of new components to the system. We also have a flexbox implementation in the works for the design system, which we hope to launch soon.
Establishing the design system was a collaborative leadership success and an example of Ux strategy improving the practice of non-technical instructional designers. I’ll expand on more specifics about the use, growth, and governance of the design system in future blog posts. For now, I’ll declare our design system a success in supporting our creation of learning materials for the web.