REI’s Cedar
Design System:
Onboarding
Onboarding developers to a sustainable design system
Overview & Impact
Cedar is REI’s digital design system. I led the creation of an official Cedar onboarding process for the hundreds of new employees at REI. We found that by improving Cedar onboarding, we could improve adoption and increase feedback which allows us to improve the design system more effectively and efficiently.
Role
Design Lead
UI/UX Designer
UX Researcher
Process
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01
We identified a need for front end developer onboarding resources and process based on the lack of official resources and the knowledge that over 60 new front end developers would be joining the team in the new year.
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02
By interviewing developers and designers, performing competitive analyses, and creating personas based on our discoveries, we found that we would need a mixture of resources for new and existing developers who learn best by doing first and those who learn best by reading first.
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03
I created a project roadmap and defined the requirements and goals. We focused on creating a landing page of resources with step-by-step ways both new and existing developers at REI can use Cedar. Within that landing page, we also scoped an FAQ page and a video tutorial companion.
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04
From here, I designed and wrote copy for the landing page, FAQ page, and the script for the tutorial video. I then got feedback from developers and worked with developers and a product manager on my team to deliver these resources.
User Journeys
Solution
We delivered a landing page that has been bookmarked and used to effectively navigate and use the Cedar design system by dozens of front end developers at REI. I also created a feedback survey that automatically gets sent on a semiannual basis to make refinements to these resources as needs change.
