On Theme: Design Systems in Depth
Exploring how successful design systems get built, maintained, and deliver impact for their product teams. Go deeper than tokens and get more detailed than "it depends". Expect aha moments, actionable insights, thoughtful discussions, and spicy takes from accomplished design system practitioners. Hosted by Elyse Holladay.
On Theme: Design Systems in Depth
Shipping new ways of working to a classic organization with the One UPS system, with Marcela Rodriguez Joos — #13
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Marcela Rodriguez Joos shares the story behind the One UPS project, a massive effort to modernize and unify UPS’ brand and digital experiences through a new design system. Marcela reveals how a “why does everything look different?” moment from their CEO was the catalyst for this ambitious effort, how they’re collaborating across a massive org, and successfully reducing development timelines from years down to months. Plus, Marcela’s team dishes out their design system spice takes!
Links & References
- Marcela Rodriguez Joos on LinkedIn
- Marcela on the Into Design Systems Connect your Design System to business value Roundtable
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I don't know if I'm going to see the end of when all of this gets updated to the current design system. But I have seen the progress that we've made. And right now, under our belt, we have over 15 experiences that have come on board with the design system. And it has been remarkable to also see how fast the teams are moving, especially with the latest releases of some of our recent applications. Basic shipping is one of them, it's available on ups.com today and some of our onboarding flows. Things that would take previously, maybe, over a year or two years, can now actually be released within a year, six months, right? So it definitely has made a difference.
Elyse:This is On Theme, Design Systems in Depth, and I'm Elyse Holladay. Together, we'll be exploring how successful design systems get built, maintained, and deliver impact. Design systems is due for a major reinvention moment, and I want to share what's working from design system practitioners out there forging the way. As you listen, text the show with your thoughts, aha moments, and questions by clicking the text link in the show notes. Before we begin, a quick thank you and word from our generous sponsor, Into Design Systems. Into Design Systems is back with their annual virtual conference, May 28 30, 2025. Visit intodesignsystems. com slash ontheme to get your ticket to three days of practical, hands on sessions showing the what, why, and how of design systems. This year, the conference is focused on developer handoff, accessibility, multi brand theming, and governance. You'll get hands on knowledge you can put to use at work immediately, files and resources to take away, and hear from very well known industry speakers. Get your ticket at intodesignsystems. com slash on theme, and I'll see you at the conference in May. All right, let's dive into the show. Today on the podcast, I'm really excited to welcome Marcela Rodriguez Joos. She leads the Design System and the Center of Design Excellence at UPS, and she partners with teams in design, development, and products to advocate for design innovation and has been a core part of their One UPS project. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia with her husband, her three year old son, and in her non work time, she loves music, dancing and painting. Marcela, thanks for coming on the podcast.
Marcela:Thank you for having me Elyse, I'm extremely excited to share the space with you again and engage in awesome conversation. So thanks.
Elyse:You are so welcome. I'm excited too. When I decided to start doing this podcast, one of the things that I was really thrilled to do is actually showcase some real projects, some real efforts that were happening at companies, letting expert design system practitioners really tell us, what's going on inside your company, big or small, what's working and what's not working. So, today, Marcela is going to give us a deep dive into the One UPS project and the design system effort at UPS. So let's just dive straight in. What is the One UPS project? What has the evolution been up to this point? How did you get here? And what are y'all up to?
Marcela:For me, it's such an exciting story to tell, because when you think of UPS, everyone immediately goes to the brown trucks, logistics, a giant in the industry, and basically like a global presence. And we've been around for over a hundred years, right? But traditionally, has UPS been seen as a design organization? One that is truly focused on the customer experience? If you were to ask everyone that question, the answer would probably be no, right? So to have a chance to be a part of that transition that we've seen in the past couple of years has been a great opportunity. I started with UPS in 2016. And at that time I was brought on board to support the revamp of ups.com. It had not been redesigned since 1999, and fun fact, if you use the Wayback Machine, you're able to see the evolution of a lot of the different sites. And I did my homework, right, and I went back and I'm like, okay, what did ups.com look like in 1999? Or even like in the two thousands? And you're seeing what was happening, very much on trend with how, basically industry was, you know, 800 by 600, very static link farm not user friendly. And so 2016 came around we're introducing our first responsive site. And with that, the introduction of accessibility guidelines, and data analytics, starting to put in all of those tags, and measure the experience and truly understand what customers are doing and what they're using. And on top of that, also user testing, right? So getting that direct feedback. So it's a very interesting time. And again, when I started, I'm like, okay, well, how am I going to design for UPS? I was given a brand guideline and I'm like, okay, and in there you have in essence, a design system. It's 116 pages long. It's a PDF. And the colors are in Pantone. So with this revamp, where we're creating like the first style guide of the digital standards. We ended up launching worldwide around 2017 and 2018. We ended up starting to explore our first kind of like design system to support this style guide and kind of create those rules and the guidance for just the ups.com site. And, there was a front end developer and he was like, we should really build a design system, have you heard of Atomic Design? And I'm like, no, I haven't heard of it. So we're like, okay, let's work on it. And we build this entire content matrix, and we start putting all the pieces together, and feeding the system. Around the same time, another team all was actually building another design system, which was feeding all of our internal applications. And they decided to put this project together, and it was very comprehensive. Not necessarily on brand, but you know, basically taking like Bootstrap and any of the other technologies to be able to reskin it and be more efficient. And they were supporting maybe a little bit over 20 different designers. So simultaneous efforts, everyone kind of like going in the same direction, trying to support UPS and the different touch points. But it wasn't until 2020, we had a new CEO. And Carol Tomé came in, and she's looking at everything and diving in, trying to learn about UPS and getting well versed in all areas. And she asks, why does everything look different? And I'm like, funny you should ask, right? Like we all ask the same thing. We had posters on the wall that would say this is One UPS. But every instance looked very different and disconnected. Everything was just very disparate. And so she was really a catalyst, right? And she was the one that basically said, okay, this should be a priority. So around that time, we began establishing the Center of design excellence, and it was really to help support all the various teams that were creating digital products, right, and established this new way of working, then really rally around experience design. Because in the past, in reality, UPS never had internal resources dedicated to these tracks. We always leaned on, on vendors and, other support to come in for those stints of time, but we never really had a design community inside of UPS. And so with that, obviously we started talking about design systems, looking at different design systems, figuring out what we needed, and how we need to support this revamping the site yet again. We were taking advantage of a migration. And then lo and behold, here we are. We have what we were pointing to 4. 0 design system. Now the official UPS design system. And so that that leadership decision was really what enabled us to create this design system. Now we're, we have a full dedicated team to it, and it's propagating through all of our experience and we're extremely excited.
Elyse:I love that. There's two things that are just so important. When you were talking about the CEO being like, why does everything look different? This is important, why aren't you going after it? But having somebody like the CEO notice and think that's important is the catalyst to be able to go after that, and to be able to talk about that in a way that matters to the whole organization. And a migration, a technical migration of any kind, is also a catalyst for, if we're going to get in there, if we're touching it, if we're changing things. Often in design systems we want to be like, if design consistency is so important, why aren't we going after this? But it takes a catalyst. There's always a reason. And sometimes that reason has to be C suite, or major migration or refactor, or major pivot, or like some other kind of crisis moment where it becomes very clear that this actually is worth investing in, because up until that point, there's always other priorities and other things that are more important. For people who are listening, like remembering that those are good things, right? Those catalysts are good things, like the CEO coming in and being like, why does this all look different?, is actually a good thing. That is a moment that you can really latch on to to get an effort started. So tell us what is the One UPS project? What does that encompass?
Marcela:So One UPS is in essence rallying around our design language. And as we reestablished our design language in alignment with our brand guidelines, right? Like ensuring that we are representing the brand in the right way, in the right tone, with our flavor, right? Who do we want to be, like similar to Coca Cola? Like when you see something Coca Cola, you instantly recognize it. And there's so many other global brands that you're just like, I don't need to see your logo, I know who you are. And I think part of that is what that UPS initiative is intended to be. It doesn't matter that you are, looking at ups.com or going to capital, or going to one of our subsidiaries, or partner sites. But it intrinsically feels, and not only feels, but it also enables you to interact with it, with connection. That I'm not in different, in different sites doing different things, like you know who I am. I think there's a lot to that because obviously we started with our biggest channel, ups.com. But beyond that, we've had advocates and partners like UPS Capital and InsureShield. And they were immediately like, yeah, let's do this. Let's theme what you have, make it work for our branding, and let's, let's show, you know what we got. And so we started like just propagating this and then starting to support other entities, UPS Healthcare, the UPS Store. And now obviously we have other other partners, like Roadies, and Ware2Go, and so forth, where we're trying to do the same. And so obviously our roadmap is pretty, is pretty, big. And we're really trying to like reel everything in in a way. But on top of that, it's not just the dictation of like, you must, because. It's a, let's have these conversations so that we can support each other and figure out what we need in order to flex and scale. Because it's not just about, hey, the design system is dictating this, but it's like, what do we need to do to support all of these experiences? Each site has made very intentional decisions. And nobody is discrediting any of that, right? There's been thorough thought, there's been tons of time, there's been designers and developers and strategists and marketers working on all of these projects. And so it's not about coming in and bulldozing it, but it's about, okay, let's make those connections. Let's figure out what we need to do in order to support each other and grow together. Because if we can have those good conversation, then we can get so much more out of this relationship.
Elyse:Yeah. I think when you say, the roadmap is big, that might be a little bit of an understatement. I can only imagine all of the things that are actually on y'all's plate. So like how big are we talking about? You mentioned ups.com, you mentioned a bunch of subsidiaries, and other UPS properties, like how many sites, apps, teams, are we talking about?
Marcela:I mean, people wise, I can't even tell you. But when we conducted the great audit of 21 which is basically like, how I refer to it, we were getting ready for the revamp of the site yet again, because of the site migration. And we had teams come in and we supported an audit. An extensive audit of over 35 plus digital touch points, internal and external, right? 80 plus transactional applications, 50 plus components and patterns. It was just looking at almost everything that we could find that we needed to take into account. And we uncovered a lot of opportunity, right? It's that alignment. As we've mentioned, and everyone talks about, it's like the simplest thing, which could be a button. And we found over 40 instances of buttons. And if you consider the amount of effort that is needed to support just a button, right? It's just, it's a little too much for you to be saying, okay, I'm going to custom code each of these buttons for every single instance. And I think you and Brad talked a little bit about it, but it's like, oh, if I'm going to change a color, I'm going to have to go to 80 pages and have to do it. It is pretty significant. And so obviously like from a strategic standpoint, our team had to really prioritize, okay what are those bigger things? Or what, where, what do we need to go after and what order? And we're in 2025 now, I had to double check, I have no idea what year we're in. And we started these efforts. We launched a new site in 2022. And since then, we've slowly been bringing in these sites and like figuring out how to support them. And we still have so much to do. Obviously, I don't know if I'm going to see the end of when all of this gets updated to the current design system. Maybe at that point we'll be in a different version of it, a different style infused with a different design language, who knows? But I have seen the progress that we've made. And right now, under our belt, we have over, I think, 15 experiences that have come on board with the design system. And it has been remarkable to also see how fast the teams are moving, especially with the latest releases of some of our recent applications. Basic shipping is one of them. It's available on ups.com today. And some of our onboarding flows. Things that would take previously, maybe, over a year or two years, can now actually be released within a year, six months, right? So it definitely has made a difference.
Elyse:When we talk about design system metrics or design system success or outcomes, I feel like we get very caught up in, specific adoption numbers or component numbers, but those are the kinds of things that you want to see. Those are the kind of outcomes you want to see. We've actually enabled this team to move faster. And you may not be able to measure that in any more precision than months. But for a team to be able to say, yeah, the last time that we worked on this, it took us a year and a half, and this time it took us six months, is phenomenal. And I think that's the kind of stuff that leadership can get excited about when we think about real outcomes. So it sounds like you started with ups.com. Is that right? Was that kind of the first
Marcela:Yeah.
Elyse:Adoptee?
Marcela:Started with ups.com mainly because of the site migration. We needed to update the platform. And so it was a perfect opportunity for us instead of trying to retrofit capabilities, it was like, let's start from scratch. And that was, one of our great leaders in our department, like, guess what? We get to start from scratch. And we're like, what do you mean?
Elyse:That never happens. So you were actually completely redesigning ups.com, and creating the design system simultaneously. Is that right?
Marcela:Well, interestingly enough, we were retrofitting new capabilities into the design system then, Design Lab. And at that point it was like we made a presentation of everything that we needed to finalize some of these component updates and so forth. And then, hey, everything you guys just presented, we're probably going to scrap that cause we're just going to start fresh. And it was like ground zero. Like let's, let's look at our buttons. Are they square? Are they round? How are we, so it was starting everything from a new perspective.
Elyse:That must feel so good and so bad at the same time. To be like, all of this work, we're just going to have to trash, and, nothing is wasted. You still learned a lot from all of that. And you have the joy of getting to really dive in at the fundamental level of, what is our design language and how do we apply it? So that must also have been really fun, but I imagine sad too.
Marcela:It was eyeopening, because with that initiative, and obviously because it was a big undertaking, we had a lot of vendor support, and they're just great partners, to be honest with you. And we did a lot of user research, like we had great concepts, right? But it was, it really ended up being on the user to tell us what they wanted to see and how they wanted to interact with us. And so seeing all that user research was very interesting. And even putting out like varied color palettes and, different styles, and things that we were demonstrating, and they're like, you know what, this doesn't feel like UPS. Yes, it might be modern. Yes, it looks cool, but this doesn't speak to me like UPS. And so sometimes you're like, okay, then I guess, we want to be edgy and cool, but we still have to like, keep some of those things like true to ourselves. And one of those things was like brown, right? Some of the feedback was like, hey, like we don't like brown. But guess what? That's our color.
Elyse:I hear brown is in now it's 2025. Brown is in, you were ahead of the time.
Marcela:Yeah, a hundred percent. Honestly we made brown work for us, and leaning like on those primary colors that are in our shield, and like one of our most identifying traits. And I think like seeing the evolution of our branding elements was also very interesting. We definitely got a view of a lot of different areas and ways of approaching our experiences. I don't necessarily want to call it just the design system, because it's about the experiences. And I think it is that, that connection point across so many ways that people, interact with UPS. And it's about the emotion. It's about the appeal. It's about the ease of use, the simplicity, the jargon, right? If you look at some of the sites from the past on ups.com, there's so much jargon. And now we're really trying to connect with our users, understand them, and I think that is a big shift. Granted, it's not just because of the design system, but obviously we've been able to rally around some very big pillars. And I think that is helping us move in the direction that we need to go in order to support our customers.
Elyse:That's such a good reminder of the real value of design systems, right? It's how we build UI, but especially in these big organizations, it's, how do we maintain our brand? How do we share that brand and design language across all kinds of customer experiences. Whether that's digital, or physical, or an email, or in this case like sending a package, or the physical truck or whatever. I know that Chris and Richard at Knapsack talk about this a lot, that the big future for design systems is with these global brands who are using the design system as a way to apply the brand language across multi platform, multi channel, multi experience. And that's a really exciting thing to see happening in this space.
Marcela:And you just reminded me in a way, that it's like from brand guidelines, and then looking at digital guidelines, it's like sometimes they're seen as separate, but it's, they're not. They stem from the same thing. And for me, it's been extremely important to keep that partnership with our branding partners, because obviously, they're responsible for that big vision, as a company and how people are looking at our brand entirely. And then obviously, from a digital perspective, it's how they're interacting with us on all of these touch points. And so it's not separate. You can't just say, you know what you do you, we do us, and because we're digital, we need certain things. It's okay, let's have those conversations and make sure that we're supporting everything, as seamlessly and as cohesively as possible. Because ultimately, like we want that brand to be elevated, and for people to truly recognize everything as a whole, going back to our One UPS.
Elyse:Yeah. Let's talk about those conversations with brand a little bit, because I think the two reasons the design systems are often separate in product versus brand, is because the marketing site, say, needs very different components and sometimes even a different expression of the design language. Your type stack needs to be different. Maybe you can use more color on the marketing site. You can use a lot more imagery. Then you have this internal tool that needs to be very dense and very data heavy. And so the expression of that design language has to be different. So that's the first thing, right? Like the same components, or the same theme, cannot necessarily power both the marketing site and the internal tool and the customer facing UI. But also, the org chart, right? Conway's law. You ship your org chart. And often, brand and marketing sit separately from product design. What are you doing to integrate those? How do you keep those things connected?, when the actual tools or the actual, theme or the actual like technology, maybe, isn't connected.
Marcela:We've had to have conversations with partners across the entire organization, to build that acumen, build that understanding of the reasons why. Because even when requests come in from some partners, they're like, does it go to digital or does it go to brand? And so it's a really fine line. As I mentioned, I've made it a point to stay very connected with our brand partners, and our leadership is always trying to understand, okay what's changing? And where we need to make intentional decisions to support digital, then we ensure that they're at the table as well. And we understand the reasons why we're having some deviations. An example: our brown in print is a different tone than it is on digital, because on digital it comes off as a more reddish tone than the one that we picked. And so we had to explain that. Our iconography, the way that we use illustrations on our sites today, we're using a more dimensional 3D kind of like icon, whereas in print, they're going a little bit more flat, right? More basing it on some of the campaign work and that tone and that energy that they're wanting to transmit through different initiatives. But there is still a cohesion around how we approach things. And so I think it is the sharing and having that empathy for the different roles and responsibilities, and understanding that there are impacts. And it's not just with brand. I think it's with anybody across the organization, whether they're creating like new tactics for marketing, or how they're speaking to customers or even even phone calls, right? The phone that they're using and the way that they're interacting with our customers becomes, becomes critical, that you have those conversations, are intentional with the decisions that you're making, and none of this is ever about you, right? Like you bring ideas to the table, but, you need your partners there with you, right? You need to make them see, you need to vouch and advocate for the things that you believe in, but at the end of the day, it really is a collaborative effort. And I think that's the beauty of being able to like rally around something that people are believing in, because they're part of it, and it's not being dictated to them. And I don't know if this is my spicy take, right? But sometimes design systems are, I'm jumping the gun here, they basically, it's oh my creativity being like, is being— I couldn't find the word—curtailed?. Yeah, curtailed! You're a gatekeeper or you're a blocker, or, I can't do what I need, but it's, no, this is what we have. This is our foundation. We're not here to be your cops. We're here to basically enable you with some foundational things, but hey, if you need to detach it,detach it,, but make sure that it's intentional, right? Make sure that you're making the right decision for your product and then you're not just keeping it for yourself, but then you're communicating it back and presenting that as a viable use case of why this is working better, so that then other teams can also reap the benefits. Without that communication, we end up in the siloed world of, everyone just does what they want. And that's where you have that disjointed experience. And that's where we were. And it wasn't an intention, right? It wasn't an intention to live in siloed world, but everyone's just so focused in their priorities and what they want to achieve. It becomes very challenging to say, hey, let me take the time, to talk to this other partner that I have across the pond, or that's sitting next to me. And oftentimes by, by making those intentional moments of connection you realize, oh my god, we're working on the same thing. We're both spinning our wheel trying to solve this and we're both doing exactly the same thing. And I'll add in, one of the things that, that I still live by. During the time that I was doing research for design systems, I talked to many industry leaders and was trying to understand a little bit more on how to lead like the Center of Design Excellence, but then also familiarize myself with design systems. So in my research, I came across a quote from Lindsay Berry, she, they were doing an interview of her work on the Spotify design system. And she said, it's important to remain positive when communicating with others because we are the physical embodiment of the system. If we are easy to work with, so is the system. If we are intimidating, so is the system. And for me that was like, mic drop, whoa. Okay, so I have to embody this, like I have to represent this. I have to advocate, I have to be willing. Open door policy, happy to help. How can I help you? Oh, let me share information. And I've made my team adopt the same thing in our roadshows when we would train or onboard new people to the design system, or when we were advocating for the benefit of the design system, it was the quote. It was the first thing that we have in our decks of, this is who we want to be, and this is how we are going to work.
Elyse:This I feel like has been coming up on every episode of the podcast, and this is not new. Jina has been saying this for years, design systems are about people. And you cannot ship enough tools to bypass conversations. There are no amount of artifacts that you can create that are going to get a team's buy in, or interest, or any particular designer or engineer's time and willingness to pick their head up and go I'm going to go take this to this other team, or I'm going to share this in meeting where other stakeholders are, or I'm going to go talk to marketing. And conversely, what is so hard about that, even if, you as a designer or an engineer, pick your head up and go, I'm going to go share this with somebody, you can't just drop it in their lap and be like, hey, marketing, what do I, what do I do with this? Like, how do I, does this fit in? It takes a lot more engagement and effort on everybody's part to actually come to a decision and then roll that decision out across content, and accessibility, and brand, and like physical stuff, and the website, and the emails, and the phone calls. There are so many places that a change like this affects, that you have to really take the time. It's one of the coolest places for design systems to engage. We have those touch points across the organization in a way, that maybe any individual product team or partner team or any individual designer or engineer or content writer or whoever, may not actually have. But then bring that back, kind of surface it up to the system and have a space to engage in those conversations. Especially in a big org like UPS, right? That's quite a bit easier when you are very small, but when you are the size of UPS, when you are a global company, that is extraordinarily challenging. So let's bring it back to the design system itself. Tell us what you have actually created, what you have actually shipped, in terms of the system. What is actually considered part of the One UPS design system?
Marcela:So our design org spans multiple different teams, between even marketing and IT, and partner sites. But right now, especially supporting ups.com, we have a centralized front end development team. But through a partnership with Brad Frost when he was with Big Medium and Josh Clark, they came in and did an evaluation of everything that, that we had and how to engage and how to scale our system and the roadmap ahead. And with that, obviously it brought in some opportunities, including Storybook, and being able to bring in ZeroHeight to support our site. And Figma, thankfully we already had. We have somebody on our team, we actually call him the Figminator. He is quite amazing. And he was the first one to push for a new tool, when we were still using Adobe XD, and some other tools, and he's no, we have to go to Figma. I think he pushed papers for almost a year to get that to come through. And thankfully it has, because it has changed the way that we work entirely. And so he is still on my team supporting that and scaling. And we have a full site. It's not open source, but we do have a documentation site that is very thorough. In the beginning, it was maybe a little too thorough, too detailed. One of Brad's comments was like, hey, maybe you guys can scale back on the amount of documentation you're doing, so we're still trying to scale back and simplify and refine. But as far as designers go, we have, in our direct team alone we have over 20, like in my department. And as I mentioned we've been scaling our design teams even since the time I started. And we're bringing that talent in house, which is tremendous, right? We hadn't made that investment before. And we have extremely talented people both on the IT side and here, and everybody like having this mindset of how to really work, and enhance the tools, and build new capabilities and the processes, and it has really been a game changer for us. And as I mentioned, with this site unification, we've been able to launch from a customer facing perspective, we have over, I think, seven or eight sites, that are fully revamped, using the new design language and design system. And then from an application perspective, we have about three that have fully launched, and a lot more that are in the works. And so this year you can expect that some of those experiences are going to change. And not only just from what you're seeing, but those interactions, they're getting smarter. We're enabling a lot of interactions that are going to make those transactions and those convert some transactions a lot easier. Yesterday we reviewed international shipping. My gosh, if you ever need to ship something international, the amount of things that you have to account for, it is insane. And beyond just what customers are seeing, there's also an opportunity for us to look at things internally and see how we can actually go after some of those things. And we still have a lot of applications that are in legacy. That backlog that you're always looking at, and you're like, I wish we could just do this. But it's like, there aren't enough hours in the day to go after everything, and you wish you just had that magic wand, and said, you know what, let's update everything and have everything be beautiful!
Elyse:Especially legacy apps that just don't, it's okay, we can't sunset this, but nobody, not enough people use it for us to make a continued investment. And there's always going to be that stuff. I think it's a pipe dream to think that you'll ever get everything, yeah, perfect.
Marcela:Yeah. Yeah.
Elyse:Let's get even more specific though. Tell me what is in the system?
Marcela:So in Figma, we do have our component library and we have been very meticulously ensuring that we have everything that's available in the design system for our designers to get. So he has separated everything out. We have the atomic elements in one part, and then we split it up into, some of those components that are a little bit more complex than then patterns, right? The patterns are more like the unicorns right? That we don't necessarily know if they're going to be widely used, but they're made available to to everyone in the organization, so at least they have like line of sight into some of those things. Now, one of the biggest challenges that we still have and run into is, from a design system side, we are designing and creating all of these new components, but the knowledge, knowing what's in it, right? not necessarily like understanding, oh this new variation is there, so as you're designing, you're like looking for things, and if the terminology is not what you expected, or you don't know that it exists, you're going to do your own thing. And so in demos, it's like, Hey we noticed this, or, Hey, we have that. And so I think there's still a big opportunity of, how do we bring some of those things more, more front and center. We still haven't quite figured it out. But we do have some designers that are very well versed in in variables and they're starting to make all of this, all of these parts and pieces come together, which is reducing page sizes, and especially in prototypes, making them a lot smarter. And using those prototypes for user testing, which makes it feel like it's an actual experience. And so that, that is definitely helping, on all fronts, from presenting and pitching these concepts, to also just showing to our developers and our partners, hey, this is our expectation, this is what we're needing. But then also just, getting that validation.
Elyse:Yeah. You mentioned something that I really want to touch on, because I think it's a hot topic in design systems, and that is reviewing designs. Obviously as a design system team, you cannot review, in depth, every single piece of design work that your organization is doing. How are you talking to the teams who are doing design outside of your team about, how you have those conversations without becoming the gatekeeper, the no team, or just overwhelming your design system team with, now your only job is reviewing and gatekeeping other people's work. It's completely unsustainable. And I know that lots of companies have gotten into that trap with their design system. How are y'all thinking about that?
Marcela:So there's still a little bit of friction there that we're trying to work through. And our leadership says, you can't save all the whales. And so, our mindset has been, okay, what are our top business priorities, and what are the top kind of like initiatives that we really want to go after? And those are the things where we definitely want to stay in tune with. Not to say, hey we have to do checks and balances for everything, but I do think that it's an opportunity to have more intentional conversations with them. And understand like what new things did you need? If you detach, what are you doing? How are we feeding this back? How can we support you? We do have a collaboration session, and that spans different disciplines, and we have an audience of over 80 people, right? A lot of people are a little hesitant to come into this design collaboration, but, again, we're trying to make it as approachable as possible and be like, we're going to give constructive feedback. And obviously, if there's anything that could be improved, we try to follow up on it. But those are the opportunities, really. And then before things get to development we want to be able to review some of those experiences and ensure that they're in alignment with other things. And it just so happens that in some of these reviews, we are catching opportunities to better align, right? Oh, we saw this in this application, but hey, they're doing this other thing, how about you guys talk and figure out what's going to be the best route forward?, because you're presenting this in this way, which seems super logical, but they have really good things too. So let's just, let's get together. People feel a certain way about the word governance, especially as designers. And it's been as a bad thing. But I think there has to be some way, right, some way of design committee to be able to define you know where there are those opportunities of connection. There is a way of working that we need to figure out a little bit more, but we've definitely made some headway there.
Elyse:I love the focus on it not being the design system team being the final arbiter. It's, hey, we saw this other team doing something really similar, y'all should chat. It's not necessarily on the design system team to always resolve all of those differences or all of those conflicts. I think what a design system team can bring that's so valuable, is surfacing those moments of connection where the team might not necessarily realize, because you're getting to see all of this stuff. Something that's really hard to do with a single design system, you know, we were talking about this, like having the marketing site, or the internal tool, or the customer facing UI, be different, is balancing those needs in a single system. There's been a lot of talk in the design system space around systems of systems, around theming, around having these like recipe layers. I know that's something Brad Frost has talked a lot about. How are you thinking about balancing all those different use cases inside the system, whether that's theming or recipes or systems of systems or something else?
Marcela:We have adopted this recipes model, inspired by Brad and our connect with him, and seeing how these opportunities to showcase ways of solving the more complex problems so that they can be repeatable. But we've also had pilots, as I mentioned with some of our partner sites, that they've taken our design system, but they've applied a theme to it so that it, it is more to their style. And on top of that, they've been scaling, so very specific needs that they have on how they're supporting their product and then sharing it back, right? So it's not like we're absorbing it entirely, but there are like separate libraries to support those different entities. So as far as being able to fully set it up, representation within the design system is truly like still at the master file level. And we haven't yet started to absorb like these different entities and the different themes. It is definitely in a roadmap for 2025. Just recently, I actually uncovered an entire UI kit for Bootstrap and a team put in all of the effort to reskin this to the new design language and style, even though these are things that we already have. And so, those are opportunities to expose, okay, well, how are we going to to support broadly right? And be able to disseminate all that information. And we're definitely not there yet. There's still things that we're pursuing that are almost like basic building blocks for design systems. But obviously in a large organization, you need a lot of buy in, you need a lot of conversations, and level setting, and figuring out, and prioritization to really go after some of these items. But the intent is there right in our big wishlist of how we can make this even better, um, is something that we're definitely focused on. Better, not bigger.
Elyse:Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Better not bigger. In another episode on the show, I was talking to ToniAnn at BetMGM and she was saying, when you've said it 80 times, like that's when they're just hearing you for the first time. And the bigger your organization gets, the more true that is. Because it's so much harder to know what all the teams are doing and have all these touch points. And you really do have to repeat yourself over and over and over. And like you were just saying, as soon as you think that you've got it, then you're like, and then I discovered this whole new UI kit that this other team like went and just did, you want to be like, hello, have you not been paying attention? We've been here, we've been talking about this. But, like you said before, you have to be showing up as that positive face, as that non intimidating face. It's not, hey, we have this already, you didn't need to do that. It's, that's amazing, we love that you are adopting our design language that we've been working so hard on. What other tools can we provide you? And it's just this little like flip in the way we, speak to those teams. Because you are never going to control all of it. You are never going to not be discovering some team going off the rails somewhere. It's that constant work of communication and collaboration to get everybody going in the same direction. And you never get it a hundred percent, right? Like you just can't, it's not possible, because humans.
Marcela:Yeah. And to be fair, right, it's a matter of awareness, especially for big companies. We're not sitting all on the same floor and people know that this is going on. So it's like, if we're not doing, you know, PR if we're not communicating, or if we're not exposing kind of these opportunities to work together, then others don't know. And this other team that put this entire UI kit together, they're proactive! They're like, oh, we'll just, we're going to adopt this and we're going to do all this.
Elyse:They're actually doing something that you want, which, which is participating in the effort you're trying to make happen of this new design language, even if they're going about it in a way that's not ideal.
Marcela:Yeah. Yeah. And sometimes lack of knowledge, right? Is it something that's reusable? Is it something that's actually that another team is going to be using? And so again, I think there's just still so much opportunity to learn from each other, and connect the dots. Which is really hard, right? You have to really be like, hey, I want to talk to you. Hey, let's connect. Hey, let's meet. Keeping it positive and keeping open, like, how might we work together and make this better for all of us?
Elyse:Yes. How might we, the design question, how might we do this? On the engineering side, what has your relationship been like, who's building the engineering side of these components? You have developers on the actual design system team or product teams picking these up?What is that setup like?
Marcela:So currently, we have a centralized front end development team, and it's about 11 engineers spanning different, different areas, right? And their backlog is massive. I think one of the best things that has come out of last year has been the relationship that we've been able to build with our front end developing partners. And they have been instrumental in being able to really understand what we have in the design system, build toward expectations, but then also communicate back when they're observing a new need. Our focus has been now, with these 11 engineers, and a project manager that is just fabulous at communication, at documenting, at keeping track of everything, keeping us all like engaged. And building out those common components and really trying to propagate that across all of the app teams, which would be implementing these from a back end perspective. From what I understand, we have a lot of different back end systems that are supporting our applications, from CMS, from OpenText, to AEM to, and I don't even know, being on Bootstrap 4 and needing to upgrade to Bootstrap 5, but that's going to cause some things that are going to break. So it's. Do we put the effort in doing that or not? But if we don't, then we're not going to reap the benefits of this other thing. And those are definitely conversations that just need to continue to happen because, I think that's how we get these legacy situations where we're, we can't seem to update things, but then we stay like in this one situation, because it's been working. So it's a rip off the bandaid. But again, obviously, we know that has different impacts.
Elyse:Yeah, it's tough. As a design leader, what is something that you are extremely proud of, through all of this work? Through your efforts, through your team's efforts, culture change, obviously there's the actual design work, and presumably you're very proud of the design itself. But from a people, process, culture standpoint, as you've gone through this One UPS project and the design system work, what's an outcome that you're really, really proud of?
Marcela:I think, the way that we've been able to level up, right, from an acumen, from technology, from like understanding, from showing empathy, those are all very big culture shifts that we're not seeing traditionally like across all of the teams. The team that I sit on right now, we love collaborating. We love communicating. We love presenting and rallying around these ideas. And so, it makes me proud to belong to something like that, and still advocate for it. Design work, especially for design system, can get very technical. And it's like documenting, and the anatomy, and the guidelines, and accessibility, and annotations, and right? And you're just like, Oh my God, I missed this one label, I have to go back! So it's just like never ending, design systems are never done. We love that, but, I think it is the way that we've changed the way of working. It has impacted the culture significantly. Partnerships that I would have never thought to have, and we're getting together, we're building design boards, right? And like getting together from a leadership perspective and figuring out what can we give to these teams, to keep them engaged, keep them knowledgeable, and make them see like a different way of approaching experience design. And not only that, but also seeing how our leadership is now valuing the experience design, and understanding that, you know, this one channel could be contributing a significant amount to the bottom line. And it's, and it's all because we're approaching things with intention, and really thinking through, and we're really leveling up to bring our value, and continue to do that. So I think that makes me extremely proud, because it keeps me engaged. It keeps me inspired, and energized. You go to work and you just don't even know, but there's so much stuff.
Elyse:Yeah. It's such a juicy problem. I feel that way too. I want to touch on something that you said a minute ago about leadership. How are you talking to leadership about the success of the system, the opportunities around the system, and what you've actually been able to accomplish? At the very beginning, we were talking about the new CEO being the catalyst, and there's a really dangerous moment, I'm not gonna put a timeline on it, but you know, where you shipped some stuff, but not really enough for everybody to be really seeing the value and for that way of working to be really entrenched already. That's a really scary moment for a design system team a lot of the time, because that's the moment when it's very easy to look around and go, okay, you've been over here making components or whatever. And maybe this one team has adopted a few of them, not everybody else has, and we don't have everything. And it's just not, we're not really seeing the consistency promise, or the efficiency promise, or the speed promise, and that can be a very scary moment. So I'm really always curious when I have a guest on the show, we're talking about a project to hear, especially from people in leadership roles, or more, more senior roles or management roles, how are you talking to leadership about that? Especially at those kinds of dangerous moments? And how are you reporting back on, here's our wins, here's what we've actually been able to do. And, I don't want to say spin it, because I don't mean make something out of nothing, but, celebrate wins, but also, talk about what is still there to do and really just put it all in into perspective in a way that senior leadership can still be really on board, even when you're in the messy middle.
Marcela:So, thankfully, my leadership has all of these amazing conversations with our higher ups, and that value is coming through, from the net promoter scores and the user research and like the traction that we're getting, as we're harmonizing all of the sites. And so there is an aspect of seeing the effects of what we're doing, right? And something that is tangible and obviously like to the communications, there is that part of storytelling, right? And again, not storytelling that we're making something up because we're definitely not, but, how do you bring that, that business impact, how do you demonstrate what you are doing? And I think efforts like ones that we had recently, when we're able to ship these new products in six months, where traditionally like leadership thought that it would take a year or two, or that it would require heavy vendor support, and we're doing it all in house. And I think that's a testament to the value that we are adding. I always smile when like at the end of the year, when I'm looking on LinkedIn, people are like, oh, everything that we accomplished in 2024. We have an email communication that we send out every two weeks to everyone that is a Figma editor or subscribed to our design site, communicating what's new, what's happening, tips and tricks, awareness, this and that, and whatever. And we were able to do a 2024 recap and it was, we had to cut it down. It was so massive. And it wasn't just about design system, right? It was about like different parts and pieces that, that we were basically feeding to the organization. And I think that those are great opportunities for us to PR for ourselves. Recently my director sent me a link analyzing different brands, like where do they fall within, within design. And UPS came up and they're like, nobody talks about UPS from a design perspective. That's not even known. And I was like, well, we have something to talk about. Look at everything that we're doing. And, I think the only time I had an opportunity to really talk to our leadership, I had a presentation early last year with our CIO, to inform him of everything that we were doing within the design system. So it encompassed a little bit of everything, right? Like from the past to the present and beyond, and still those opportunities that we had and where we needed his support to invest in the things that we need, in order to continue moving the needle forward and adding that value. And I think some of it was pretty enlightening for him because he wasn't aware, right? When people think of experience design or even just digital design, they think a button, they think of color, they think an image, right. But they're not thinking about the rest of it. And I think that we're really working on changing that storytelling and bringing a different focus and different acumen to the organization of how they're looking at digital design.
Elyse:Yeah. Really talking about the product team success, that's our success, rather than here's the 25 components we built.
Marcela:The design systems is the easy part, right? Making the design system is the easy part and those foundations are easy. I think scaling, adoption, governance, and the rest of the conversations that need to take place is the biggest challenge. And that's like the focus moving forward is trying to figure out how to make this even more effective.
Elyse:Yeah. Speaking of moving forward, let's imagine we are one year in the future, it is 2026. What do you hope that you and your team have accomplished? Where do you hope you've moved things, or changed the culture, or made an impact in a new way? What are you hoping to deliver this year?
Marcela:On the roadmap for this year, we have so many things, from the technical side of refining and simplifying and making things more scalable. But in general an experience, right? I think that as a user, if you are truly interacting with an experience, and it's like from phone to site to store to driver, that there is this connection point that really makes the experience like, oh, my god, wow, like they really have it, like they know what they're doing. This way of looking at design is more than just the visual, right? It is that experience. And experience design, it is more about that feeling that you get when you're interacting with something, and it seems bigger than you. It's the way that they're talking to you, the way that they're collecting your information, the way that they're making things easy for you to fill out those forms, or walking into a store and saying, hey here's your shipping label you just created. And I really hope that UPS can continue to deliver what matters to our customers in a positive way. I had the opportunity to work in a hub during peak season in Kansas City one year. And let me tell you, when that package arrives at your doorstep, you have no idea what it's been through. It has gone through so many logistics, so many chutes and ladders. My first day on peak assignment, we finished our shift, and it was twilight shift, those package cars left the hub, and I was like, I had tears in my eyes. I was like, oh my god, like that was a beautiful thing in the entire world, like these packages go through so much I think it's celebrating the hard work and effort that goes into all those details and being able to just humanize it and put it into an experience that is tangible for users.
Elyse:Yeah, absolutely, our package delivery and logistics folks are so underappreciated. I think it's very easy to sit here and push a button on a website and then be like, where's my stuff? And not think about how much physical labor goes into getting that to your door, and then the effort from like UPS, or the digital team, to show that to you in a UI, and show that to you in a real time way, is actually really kind of, a marvel when you think about it.
Marcela:Thank you. Thank you for giving me the time. And obviously again, this is not about me. This is to celebrate all of the people that work on these products, in every sense of the way. Kudos to them.
Elyse:Yeah, it's my pleasure. Uh, to wrap up, we always have one question for everybody who comes on the show and that is the spicy take question. So Marcela, tell us your spicy take on design systems.
Marcela:So, because you have wrapped up other episodes with this, I actually asked my team and they were asking, how spicy do you want it? And I'm like—
Elyse:A hundred percent spicy. Off the charts, please, I want the whole list.
Marcela:Yeah some of them were like, a lot of design systems are in analysis paralysis stage of what exactly needs to be documented. There was another spicy take about dev mode and dev connection, and like leaning on code that is enabled by a design tool rather than the expertise of engineers that know the language or have established a very
Elyse:Chef's kiss, that is my spicy take. Also agree with this person go back and tell them that I agree.
Marcela:And then a very spicy take, it says, the people who actually need to use the design system, aren't the same people as the ones who need the guidelines of the design. So I guess, in there right learning curve and just making sure that, all designers are aware and follow the rules.
Elyse:Yes, this is the classic they don't read the docs. But it's true, it's like, if you're engaged, you're not reading the docs because you're already thinking about those things, and then you're going and looking, you're going and looking at Storybook, you're looking in Figma, whatever, you don't have to read all the details because you're paying attention. And then if you're not, you're just not, you're like, totally off the rails.
Marcela:I guess another spicy take on that one is, we spend all this time documenting, right? And creating all of this supportive guidelines and documentation for every single piece and element in the design system. And nobody ever reads it, until you don't have something, and that's when they ask, or that's when it's brought up. Because it's like, hey you never said I couldn't do this! Okay, cool. I'll add it right now.
Elyse:So, you know, this is, this is how we have all these like ridiculous laws on the books that are like, you can't drive your donkey backwards down the main street on Sundays. And it's like, why is this a, what, what? But you know, somebody was out there doing it and someone were like, we have to write this down? Okay. We're going to, we're going to, write this down.
Marcela:If it's not explicitly called out, somebody's going to do it.
Elyse:Oh my God. I love it. I love the team list of spicy takes. Anything else on the list that you want to share?
Marcela:Design systems are limited by the tools used to create them. Design systems can be used to avoid collaboration. I think some of those have been said before, but we're actually taking this as an opportunity to collaborate more, right? So the design system is gonna create more conversations.
Elyse:I love it. I love it so much. Tell your team thank you. And if they want to share the whole list, I would love to see that on LinkedIn, on the social medias, like list of UPS design systems.
Marcela:We will package it up and ship it to you.
Elyse:Beautiful. I love it so much. Marcela, thank you. Thanks to your team. Really appreciate hearing everything about the project and thanks for taking the time to come on the show.
Marcela:Thanks again, Elyse, talk to you soon.
Elyse:Thanks for listening to On Theme. This is a brand new podcast, so if you like what you're hearing, please subscribe now on your favorite podcast platform and at DesignSystemsOnTheme. com to stay in the loop. See you next episode!