During my 1st year at Spotify, I helped their design system team lay the foundation for a new component library for iOS and Android, and standardize their engineering design process.
My role
In 2019, Spotify presented a new model to design and code systems to serve more than 45+ platforms that were being created by over ≈2,000 engineers and ≈200 designers.
In 2021, I joined their mobile design system team of 8 as the sole designer, with the responsibility to lay the foundation for a new component library for iOS and Android.
Framing the problem
Following growing sentiment among consumers using Encore, who wanted and expected more generic pre-built components in new programming languages for iOS and Android, my team was formed to achieve a level of parity with what Encore currently offers for the web.
Spotify serves close to 45 platforms, which resulted in teams creating 22 separate design systems over the past decade. Most of these systems are "local", meaning they predominantly contain ad-hoc components, not reusable by others.
How we did it
We started by defining and inheriting some principles, for example, relying on the established appearance and role of UI components and patterns, while improving for speed, efficiency, and accessibility.
We also leaned into Spotify's embed program—where an individual contributor can join another team for two weeks, and up to multiple months—to help us ship faster or learn about our consumers.
We constantly updated consumers on our progress and requested their feedback to minimise the possible misunderstandings that often happen when building generic components that are supposed to be adopted by multiple features.
The results
Near the end of 2022, we released a new library of selected components for iOS, Android, and Figma. For example, text, icons, colours, basic controls, lists, cards, images, swipe actions, and more.
During the year-long production, we collaborated with other teams to make sure they could deprecate their ad-hoc components and migrate to ours once we released our library. Some components required collaborations of 4–6 months.
Two months after the Figma library launch, we saw ≈8000 inserts from more than 12 teams across the company.
I also worked to create a series of Figma files to nudge new designers to align with Spotify's best practices.
Adoption
As of early 2023, ≈20 teams have created ≈20,000 instances in Figma using our library, while iOS and Android are reaching a level of adoption that enabled us to start deprecating legacy elements.