Empowering Gaming at Scale: How Xbox Builds Powerful, Automated, and Distributed Design Systems with Sketch
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
"Our PI planning events are like 600 people strong, including representatives from across our 6,000 person company."
Jack MoffettSAFe or Sorry?
May 29, 2019
"Kate said she considers live code to be the source of truth because she can't trust the design site due to inconsistencies."
Charles Lee Jennie YipBuilding a New Home for the Atlassian Design System
October 22, 2020
"Leadership is not management. It never has been."
Edward CuppsThe Principal Path: Journeying from Management to Individual Contributor
June 11, 2021
"The big question to ask in collaboration is: what is the main question you’re trying to answer and why does it matter?"
Jemma Ahmed Subhasree Chatterjee Robert Fabricant Alexandra Jayeun Lee Ben RobinsCollaboration: learning from other fields beyond our own [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]
August 7, 2024
"If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair."
Katy MogalBut Do Your Insights Scale?
March 12, 2021
"Compound effect means good upon good upon good eventually builds to incredibly fast growth."
Erin WeigelUX Lessons from running more than 1,200 A/B Tests
July 10, 2024
"AI-generated UX is not about replacing designers, but removing grunt work to focus on higher-order design."
Daniel J. RosenbergDesigning with and for Artificial Intelligence
August 11, 2022
"Evangelizing and doing design ops day-to-day is a tough balance when resources are slim."
Bud Caddell Kristin Skinner Alana WashingtonDesignOps Community Sensing Session
May 13, 2021
"In product design, we answer questions to design; in service design, we ask the right questions to design."
Cornelius RachieruHandling Complexity: Framing a Scale of Design
June 9, 2021
