You’re a small team who are trying to change culture and practice within a large org. You’ve been set up well (like many other digital transformational teams) with strong, capable people who have done this shit before.
You know through experience that showing results, and showing a clear, detailed vision of what the ambition might look like gets attention and builds trust with the high-ups.
I’ve had a problem with the use of authentic when it comes to describing some sort of aspired behaviour or way of being, but hadn’t quite got around to pinning it down until this tweet from the estimable John Cutler, who if you don’t already follow should do.
Often at work we sabotage our own goals/credibility by letting people get under our skin.
— John Cutler (@johncutlefish) May 21, 2018
You can be authentic without falling into the trap.#teams #prodmgmt #communication pic.twitter.com/NFFG9UWhLR
Previously I’ve outlined why we needed to create a more systemic approach to building our digital UI and described how brand and identity play a role in this, in this final part I’ll talk about the design system that we built, which we called Tesco’s Digital Design Language and of course immediately gave the three letter acronym of DDL.
We created the DDL as a visual design system to address the challenge of our look and feel being utterly inconsistent across our digital estate, in fact we were often inconsistent within a product. The DDL is an initiative that was initally proposed to answer the question: how should our digital estate look to our customers? By getting the many design teams and stakeholders together we would create a specification for our most common user interface elements. By having standardised versions of these elements we created the ability to optimise and improve them for everyone, rather than at a local isolated instance - in effect, we created a feedback mechanism for our look and feel.
This was intended to be about a talk design systems and how they relate to Tesco’s brand and identity. So let me start defining some terms:
Our digital estate grew very quickly and tactically: when Tesco saw an opportunity to meet its customers in a new channel we went for it - groceries, sofas, kitchens, GM, carpets, wine by the case, media streaming, and so on.
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Justin Stach