Stash design system


Design systems lead, Stash

Stash is a micro-investment and technology services app available on Android, iOS, and web.
I joined Stash in November 2023 and became the design systems lead soon after. My role was to maintain the growth and integrity of Stash Design Systems (SDS) alongside a lean team of Android, iOS, and web developers.



Stash Design System (SDS) is the product of a 2 year effort led by the previous design systems lead to increase velocity between designers and engineers.
SDS is made up of 6 libraries, making it one of the most robust design systems I and many other designers at Stash have worked with.
A contribution model had been created to aid designers in expanding SDS. However, the increased dependence on the SDS team made this model unutilized.
SDS follows a strict layer naming system with the purpose of keeping component nomenclature consistent.

However, despite the effort placed in the creation of SDS, designers found it incredibly difficult to use.
SDS was created by a small team of engineers and the original design systems lead with minimal input from other designers within the org.  At the time, designers were mostly relying on adhoc components that followed a less cohesive system. The transition from that to a robust SDS was disorienting and ultimately led to team-wide frustration.



What made SDS hard to use?

Lack of familiarity

Designers were expected to jump into major projects soon after onboarding, limiting their bandwidth to gain familiarity with SDS. Further compounding the issue was SDS’s inherent complexity. SDS relied on Figma as a source of truth for designers and engineers, and so utilized workflows that many designers were not used to.
SDS intentionally created constraints within components to ensure the system’s integrity within designers’ and engineers’ workflows, seen here in the properties panel. Learning to manipulate these properties correctly took time that designers were not afforded, and most designers had never worked with such complexity before.

Gatekeeping
Stash relied on a small team of 5 to manage and evangelize SDS from the beginning, creating a culture of dependence. Despite having a number of projects under our belt, most of our time was spent reviewing designers’ work or educating other teams. 

The general misuse or misunderstanding of SDS made it difficult to maintain its integrity and get buy-in from other teams.



SDS needed to be more accessible to the designers using it.
Adopting SDS and its workflows was difficult for designers because they were largely developed in a vacuum. Designers required not only familiarity with the system, but a system that was workable for them. This meant that SDS as we knew it had to change, and that began with dedicated education and support.