Whether it was plastic bricks, rods and connectors, or wooden logs, most of us have childhood memories of our set of maker toys. Each set had a variety of tiny pieces to build with and though they generally came with specific directions, they also spurred creativity: use the logs to build a long, skinny house instead of the traditional square one; take the plastic pieces from a spaceship set and build a skyscraper.
These toys are examples of design systems: a set of specific components (the blocks) and clear standards (how they fit together) that can be assembled for a variety of applications. Language is another loose example: components (letters/words) and standards (grammar) that together form communication—but don’t limit unique expression and innovation.
The most common design systems, however, have to do with software. They contain collections of documents, code snippets, design guidelines, and other digital assets specific to a company’s products. As web technology has become easier to codify, using design systems in product development has increased significantly since 2014, when a number of tech giants adopted the practice. And as more companies evolve and expand the breadth of their digital offerings, design systems become all the more important to maintain cohesive, quality products while allowing for a dynamic development environment.
Take Intuit for example: the 38-year-old company has been adapting its TurboTax, Quickbooks and Mint products to keep pace with technology—from making its products accessible on mobile, to integrating artificial intelligence tools to improve the user experience. Today, some 50 million customers use these products, and Intuit has implemented its own design system to ensure consistency in aesthetic and accessibility across all three. As design systems like Intuit’s proliferate and become available through opensource, the implications for product development are far-reaching at Intuit and beyond.
The Rise of Design Systems at Intuit
Adam Dierkens and Andrew Lisowski are the pioneers of Intuit’s design systems. The pair of software engineers met during an internship at Intuit in 2015, and after the internship ended, both returned full-time to the same San Diego-based team, working on a rendering library for TurboTax Online. They soon identified a need for design systems: company-wide, the dev team was adopting a distributed architecture to make collaboration and app development easier—but design challenges remained.
“We would get a team building out basically the same component in three different sections of the product,” Dierkens recalled. “So then you start having issues like, ‘This button looks like two pixels off,’ or ‘This color of blue is just slightly different.’ We wanted consistency, but we still wanted that distributed implementation model.”
Together they worked on building design tokens, the codified foundation of a design system. There’s a token for Intuit’s color scheme, a token for the amount of space needed for padding and margins on a page, what border radiuses are possible, all of the icons, and more. Engineers can use these small pieces of a page to compose larger components rather than building each piece independently. And the result? More consistency, more easily not just within each of Intuit’s products, but across TurboTax, Mint and QuickBooks.
“A few years ago, we changed the color teal that TurboTax used,” Dierkens said. “With the design system, it's super easy: You change the token to the new teal, and it propagates everywhere. Without a design system; we would have to go track down every one of those teams and say, "Hey, go change your color." And in the meantime you get this experience that has two different color teals in it, which is off-putting to the customer.”
Enabling Faster Release Cycles with Auto
The implementation of the design system was a much-needed step for the Intuit team, but it created another problem for Dierkens and Lisowski. Their team releases at least a dozen new features and utilities (think: tokens, or edits to existing tokens) into the Intuit design system on a regular basis. Each release involves many manual steps, and was taking hours of the team’s time. So Dierkens worked with Lisowski to write a script called Auto to, as the name suggests, automate the release process.
“Our design system currently has about 70 components in it, and 10 packages, and they all have their own version and their own change log,” explained Lisowski. “And what Auto enables us to do is when people make changes to the code and request for them to be merged, when it gets merged Auto will manage all of those different versions for us.”
Together with Auto, engineers can focus on the technical side of developing apps and products while the design system components ensure consistency and accessibility for the end user—meaning faster product development and release. And for a company like Intuit, where financial regulations and customer needs are always changing, that’s a major asset.
For example, in the wake of COVID-19, Intuit released a tool called Intuit Aid Assist, a free website with interactive tools to help small business owners and self-employed individuals assess their eligibility for federal relief and related tax credits from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES). The development of the tool was scheduled to take about six months but ended up taking only three weeks—thanks, in part, to the capabilities enabled by Intuit’s design systems and the Auto tool.
“And a lot of that was, ‘You don't have to think about the component side of it, or the front end, we have those covered for you,’” says Dierkens. “And it matches the rest of TurboTax perfectly, because it is the same code.”
Open Source Drives Design System Success
As Dierkens and Lisowski continue to develop tools related to Intuit’s design system, they’re cognizant of opportunities to open source what they’ve created for broader use.
“We benefit from a lot of the code out there,” Dierkens said. “If we can give back to the community, then we want to do that.”
In fact, Intuit fosters a robust open source effort across all of its engineering teams. The company maintains over 100 open source projects in GitHub. For their part, Dierkens, Lisowski and their group are behind not only Auto but also Design Systems CLI, an open source framework for actually building design systems.
“My tagline for it has been: go from zero to design system in five minutes,” Lisowski said.
And in a way, these open source tools are something like design systems themselves—providing developers building blocks for creating compelling products and services for users quickly and easily. And while many developers might chafe at the idea, the recent COVID-19 pandemic showed just how many businesses—and government entities—were forced wholly online, and have struggled due to lagging digital products and low-quality user experiences.
“If we can make it really easy to make a bunch of components, create a system and build out a nice, accessible site really fast, I think everyone benefits from that,” Dierkens said.
As the COVID-19 pandemic has ushered in a quantum leap in digital adoption both by companies and consumers alike, the rise of design systems comes as a necessary development to help bolster the rapid development of innovative products to meet our ever-changing needs.
Intuit is the global technology platform behind products like TurboTax, QuickBooks, Credit Karma and Mint. Their mission is to power prosperity around the world by helping customers and communities overcome their most important financial challenges. Visit Intuit.com to learn more about how Intuit is using their AI-driven expert platform to solve challenging financial problems for consumers, small businesses, and the self-employed.
This story was produced by WIRED Brand Lab for Intuit.
