Shopee Design System

How I helped Shopee build their design system and build a stronger developer-designer relationship

🌍 The Context

Gaining some experience with the Design system when I was in Ogilvy, I decided to further my studies in this area of UX. I interviewed for the UI/UX intern role with a very specific goal in mind.

⭕️ The Need

At that time, Shopee had a few guidelines and components in individual separate sketch files with no central location for designers to extract. They decided to embark on this design language system as Shopee is growing very fast and there was a need to align all designers across the entire APAC region.

There was a need to establish consistency and increase overall time cost on design reviews between designers and developers

🔨 Breaking this down

Being a e-commerce giant, Shopee is in charge of many products and each of these products have their own unique spheres of components.

Their then design workflow:

1. Design Request managed by the product manager

2. Passed along as a task to user experience designers

3. Designers design the screens and pass of to developers through the help of product managers

4. Developers would develop it

5. Designers will review beta live versions and comment on spec issues and pass it back to the developers

6. Repeat step 4 and 5 until perfection

I experienced step 5 and it was frankly one of the most excruciating exercises I could have ever gone through in my time as a designer. Even now.

Therefore, there was a very pertinent need to address this and solve the inefficiencies and time lost during the design cycle which could potentially save the company money in the long run.