REI’s
Cedar Design System

Overview & Impact

REI has been evolving and maturing their Design System, Cedar. I design components, refine patterns, create new system-supporting processes and create documentation across teams and platforms to support our system users and 20 million large customer base.

Role

Senior UX Designer

Team

Design Lead
Product Manager
Front-End Developers

My Process

1. Understand the problem I start each project by digging deeply into the problem to better understand it. I talk to users, stakeholders, previous contributors, and cross-functional partners to share and document our understanding of the problem. I may include personas and project documentation for the team to deliberate on as deliverables.

3. Design solutions During this phase I ideate, test, and get feedback on my designs until one sticks. Depending of the project requirements, more definition in the form of design may need to be done as part of this phase. A project which is vague may need to have other elements designed to unblock the project at hand. For example, relevant patterns may need to be defined before a specific component is created. We may decide to move forward with a component, for example, to help flesh out the relevant pattern. This phase includes many design iterations, rounds of feedback, and design testing with users. I may wireframe, and create prototypes and high fidelity designs as deliverables.

4. Launch I then will work with the developer and product manager and other relevant cross functional partners to bring the design into production. This usually includes a round of collaborative feedback after it is coded to make sure the design has included specifications for all edge cases and that the coded design adheres to the design specs. I write and design images for relevant documentation and review with the team and our users to improve it and share it out for use. I may create redlines or design specs as deliverables.

2. Define outcomes I then reflect with my team to define the scope of the project, to define measures of success we want to use to identify a successfully completed iteration of the project, and to adequately communicate this to set expectations to stakeholders, users, and cross-functional partners. I may create user journeys, story boards, roadmaps, and similar deliverables.

5. Reflect and improve I reflect on the outcomes of the project to understand went well and what were opportunities for improvement. I love retrospectives where I reflect on the measures of success the project met, what were the issues we faced, and how we can overcome them better in the future. Finally, I document ways to improve the project for future iterations and note them for others so anyone can step in to improve and maintain the project if needed.

Chips