How the Planet 4 Design System has come to life

Why and how we built the design system (and a snapshot of the improvements it will soon bring)

At the beginning of the project, the Planet 4 team mainly focused on implementing the platform across 45 Greenpeace National and Regional Offices (NROs) and setting up the crew and ship to build what Planet 4 aims to become, an engagement platform that empowers people to take action.

As Planet 4 evolved, we concentrated our efforts on improving our processes and workflows, — conducted user research and analysed data to better understand users’ needs, — built a community strategy and an architecture of participation to deepen engagement with our stakeholders, but a crucial piece of the puzzle was missing to complete the construction of the ship before setting sails: a design system that unites the product around a consistent visual language and user experience.

Since both the team and the community kept growing and changing frequently , the need for a design system became obvious, to improve not only the product design process, but also to provide a single source of truth to all collaborators.

A design system unites product teams around a common visual language. It reduces design debt, accelerates the design process, and helps prevent errors and inconsistencies across the product.

Simply put, a design system is a collection of reusable components for a product (or for an ecosystem of products), the single source of truth for product teams to keep designers, developers, and other collaborators aligned on a consistent user experience.

You may be thinking: “ great but isn’t that just a style guide?”

With no common design language to unite the product in a coherent way,both UX and workflow break down. The ones below are just some of the issues that pushed the team to create the design systems:

The advantages of the design systems span across multiple areas, from reduction of complexity to increase in effectiveness, alignment, and transparency:

The first thing the design team looked into, was to find a platform to host the design system and all its documentation.

Once we determined that zeroheight was the right tool, we decided to adopt the Company plan to manage versioning and releases, get a custom domain, and allow collaborators to leave comments.

At this point, we were ready to start building the design system.

After defining the design principles we started with a UI inventory of the styles, colors, components, and blocks used in Planet 4.

This resulted in spotting all the existing design inconsistencies across the product:

The challenge was then, to find a compromise between fixing current inconsistencies and improving the design of the current blocks that need to be reviewed as well.

We had to start small since we work in an agile workflow with an iterative process, so we decided to first fix design inconsistencies by redesigning some of these components and aligning the styles across the product, to plan a bigger UX review of the Planet 4 blocks later.

However, we needed to show the current blocks as they are so we had to re-create them in the design software we use, which took us a lot of time.

That means that the design in these sections is ready to be implemented but is not live on the Planet 4 websites yet. So worth keeping an eye on, as they will soon be appearing!

Rather than the classic version numbering (V1.1 / V1.2, etc.), we decided to use these labels to facilitate consumption and avoid confusion for the official launch of the design system.

A design system is a living document, so since the work is never done and constantly evolving, we’ve decided to start small and build as we go.

As we iteratively work on our projects, we will design with components in mind and will implement them in an iterative and agile way according to the product team’s priorities and objectives.

Long story short, the design tokens will further reduce manual work and save the product team’s time when doing design iteration or building new components.

We are not there yet but we’re definitely heading towards it.

Other key objectives of the Planet 4 Roadmap, such as redefining a new information architecture and navigation, reviewing all Planet 4 blocks and page templates, building new engagement features as well as implementing the new Greenpeace identity coming this year, will for sure impact the design system and its iterations.

We hope that in the future this first design system will also benefit other products across the whole Greenpeace organization and that is just the beginning of the story.

So stay tuned for further updates 👂👀

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