Summary
An essential part of creating a Design System is to make distribution and content flow sustainable. When the task is bringing the joy and community of gaming to everyone on the planet, the challenge gets massive! How can DesignOps and Automation become a facilitator for this challenge? Join Senior Software Engineer & Designer Luca Rager from Xbox as he takes us through their innovative take on design systems. Luca will illustrate how Sketch’s flexibility and modern DesignOps automation has allowed Xbox to package, theme and easily distribute component libraries. Furthermore, how their system bridges the gap between the Xbox Design System team and the wider product teams at Xbox.
Key Insights
-
•
Xbox Design System supports four themes including high contrast to ensure broad accessibility.
-
•
The component library needed to work across multiple platforms: TV, desktop, and mobile.
-
•
Theme customization is achieved by swapping foundational Sketch libraries rather than relying on overrides.
-
•
Every component and foundation (theme file) exists as its own Sketch file to support clarity and easy iteration.
-
•
Clyde, an internal automated tool, packages components into Sketch libraries and generates design tokens for engineers.
-
•
The design system team focused on creating easy-to-adopt kits for product designers to reduce complexity and improve uptake.
-
•
Multidisciplinary team members, including designers with engineering skills, help bridge gaps between disciplines.
-
•
Accessibility experts are embedded in the design process, enriching documentation and audits within the system.
-
•
Governance balances flexibility for product teams to propose and customize components with ensuring consistency from the core team.
-
•
Integration with Microsoft tools like Azure and Teams allows realtime notifications and seamless collaboration around design system updates.
Notable Quotes
"Gaming is for everyone anywhere, and Xbox has evolved way beyond the box under your TV."
"Our mission required us to build something fast, flexible, and scalable across many different product needs."
"A button is just a rectangle with some text, but our magic is in how we theme and customize it using foundations."
"Instead of overrides, we swap out entire theme files to customize components for different product teams."
"We realized the real problem was a people problem, not just tooling complexity."
"Sketch’s open file format allowed us to build custom tooling that shapes the design data to our needs."
"Clyde runs every time there’s a change, generating libraries and tokens to keep everyone up to date."
"Engineers love having individual components in files because it makes implementation much easier."
"Design system adoption exploded when we focused on the needs of everyone who builds, extends, or uses it."
"Accessibility and research are part of our org, not just consultants, which makes a huge difference in quality."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"Space matters, but don’t start with the space; start by changing people, processes, and mindsets."
Sam YenDriving Organizational Change Through Design? Do more of this and less of that
June 9, 2017
"If you want to scale, incorporate global UX research from day one and test your assumptions broadly."
Nancy DouyonWe'll Figure That Out in the Next Launch: Enterprise Tech's Nobility Complex
June 15, 2018
"Google Sheets and Trello are our best friends — simple, flexible, and really powerful for managing research ops."
Saskia LiebenbergStart Small for Big Impact
May 15, 2019
"Design education is ungatekeeping design – it’s inclusion, bringing everyone along the journey."
Wendy JohanssonAn Education on Design Education for Orgs
June 10, 2021
"UX researchers should learn Python or R and how to leverage AI APIs to process unstructured data."
Lija Hogan Milan Mijatovic Sam Proulx Louis RosenfeldThree Years Out: Perspectives on the Near-Term Future of User Research
March 15, 2024
"Designers must understand their domain deeply or risk being glorified production artists."
Uday Gajendar Lada Gorlenko Dave Malouf Louis Rosenfeld Dan Willis10 Years of Enterprise UX: Reflecting on the community and the practice
June 18, 2025
"No one is married to a company; people will leave if their needs aren’t met, so retention and team happiness are important success indicators."
Angelos ArnisState of DesignOps: Learnings from the 2021 Global Report
October 1, 2021
"Language is critical to shared understanding and shared context."
Husani OakleyTheme Two Intro
June 6, 2023
"Diagrams allow us to emotionally hit pause and come back ready to dig further."
Abby CovertStuck? Diagrams Help
October 27, 2022
