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Scaling the BBC Design System: Tooling, Community, Governance and Gardening is a presentation delivered by Sophie Beaumont, a Software Engineering Manager at BBC.
Overview:
The BBC Web Design System is developed to support multiple teams, brands, and audience needs across the BBC, aiming to provide consistent and accessible user experiences. It is utilized to develop and maintain over 150 components by over 25 agile engineering teams.
Key Themes:
- Community and Collaboration: The BBC employs an open and collaborative approach allowing cross-disciplinary contributions from various teams while maintaining a centralized expert team for oversight.
- Tooling and Documentation: The system leverages tools like Storybook for component management and uses Chromatic for visual regression testing. Comprehensive documentation facilitates onboarding and guides teams in using and contributing to the system.
- Governance and Maintenance: The system is not versioned, which mandates rigorous visual testing and governance to ensure consistency and accessibility in the components used across diverse BBC’s offerings.
- Scalability Solutions: The BBC addresses the challenges of scaling through innovative tools like color pickers that maintain branding consistency without expanding system complexity excessively.
Conclusion:
Through strategic governance, community collaboration, innovative tooling, and practical guidance, the BBC successfully scales its Design System, ensuring it meets both the business needs and user expectations efficiently.
This is the end of the AI-generated content.
Do you have experience managing or contributing to a Design System that has to support multiple teams, disciplines’ priorities and competing product requirements? Wondering how to meet the long-term goals of the system without getting in the way of your stakeholders’ needs?
The BBC Web Design System serves 10 distinct brands, and 25 actively contributing agile software engineering teams who are continuously building, maintaining and evolving over 150 components to solve a varied breadth of audience-facing solutions. As a founder of this Design System team, I’ll talk through our approach.
Operating at such gigantic scale, technical decisions are the foundation of a successful Design System, but for long-lived maintainability those initial technical decisions must be built upon. As we discuss real world, live production BBC examples, you can expect key takeaways to include: how to introduce tooling, build strong community collaboration, and implement governance and documentation for the benefit of your system and your users. With a little bit of gardening, you too can mitigate Design System scaling challenges.
Interview:
What is the focus of your work?
My work focuses around driving business-benefiting behaviours through systemisation, tooling and community, all while enabling the teams working with our space to create the brilliant features our users deserve.
What’s the motivation for your talk?
In a public service context, where we must be efficient and effective with our time and effort, I believe that a well managed and resourced Design System has unlocked more sustainable scale. The BBC's incredible reach and breadth of supported services and brands is a unique and fascinating example of a Design System at such huge scale, and therein lies many lessons learned and successes that we can share with the wider front-end community.
Who is your talk for?
Design System contributors, maintainers, and leadership who are looking to understand how best to support their systems when up against the challenges of scaling expectations.
What do you want someone to walk away with from your presentation?
Whether your system is brand new and you're looking to avoid future scaling issues, or your're managing a super mature system that is actively supporting multiple brands and teams, you should be able to walk away with ideas for at least one area of your Design System that you can make improvements in.
Speaker
Sophie Beaumont
Software Engineering Manager @BBC
Sophie is a Software Engineering Manager across the BBC’s centralised Web platform, having previously founded the BBC’s first dedicated Web Design System team. In her ten years in the industry, she has been on the journey from junior to principal software engineer; working on digital products visited by millions of users and advocating strongly for accessible and inclusive digital experiences. Sophie has an interest in digital accessibility, exploring the challenges of meeting efficiency, maintainability, speed and quality, and how community can contribute to the success of a system.
Date
Wednesday Apr 9 / 11:45AM BST ( 50 minutes )
Location
Windsor (5th Fl.)
