Component Audit

In Brief

The Need: Assess the level of design system compliance and determine a way to improve compliance.

Skills In This Case Study:

Experience Design
Education Design
System Compliance Design

The Result: A series of actions from quick wins to long-term plans, complete with roadmap, additional investigation, and contribution models.

Refined Requirements

To better serve the initial ask of debt assessment and improved compliance, a round of deep fact-finding took place.

That yielded a series of refined requirements:

Develop criteria for deviation types
Develop high level recommendations for improved compliance
Identify debt sources and causes

*Any actions taken during the course of this audit and planning project would need to ladder to these key goals.*

Research

With early fact-finding and refinement complete and based on prior experiences in related fields, the following hypotheses were formed

Many deviations will use same or similar code
The deviations will have multiple sources
Single source debts should be easier to ID and resolve
Single incidence deviations will be hard to spot and resolve
Deviations may indicate decisions to innovate and refactor debts later

*Another important goal was to create a sustainable plan for compliance. This was borrowed from prior experience in brand guideline development.*

The Audit

The audit itself would cover the quality assurance version of the platform as that was the most stable and consistent sampling of states, features, and tests.

The audit reviewed visual and code consistency in this environment.

Audit Results

The audit revealed a great deal of technical debt but most importantly, the following:

Code was often sourced from outside of documentation
Documentation was sometimes unclear
Technical debt could be resolved using information from the audit
Single source debts are easy to identify per hypothesis

*Ideally, debts in an experience taken on intentionally, predictably, isolated, and documented for later resolution. **Debts aren’t inherently bad**.*

Synthesis

Taking stock of the results and combining them with deep dives into the development history of Dealer Navigator, a series of conclusions were reached. Those conclusions would help in formulation of action plans and roadmap changes.

Intentional debts can be reduced by improved planning and a contribution model that allows designers to create based on forecasted needs.
Unintentional or accidental debts can be reduced through reducing, centralizing, or standardizing documentation.
Consistent deviations indicate a single code deviation and can be easily resolved
Inconsistent deviations/arbitrary uniqueness may be more difficult to resolve but can be reduced through better documentation, training, and contribution

*The audit and compliance roadmap planning made use of the above terminology throughout.*

Taking Action: Quick Wins and Long-Term Success

To resolve as much debt as possible as soon as possible, this general plan was assembled:

Address consistent, single code deviations first
Address the inconsistent deviations that occur multiple times next
Finally, look into the deviations that occur just once

For long-term UX quality, the existing roadmap was modified with focus on:

Seeking out detailed pain points and suggestions from designers and engineers
Reducing uncertainty by closing gaps in documentation
Training and “train the trainer” efforts to build a compliance culture
Self-serve contribution that encourages ownership of design documentation