Dell Design System
designleadership

Building a design system, process, and team at Dell Technologies

  • Role:
    Senior/Lead Product Designer
  • Year:
    2021–Present

Intro & Problem statement

I joined Dell in 2021 as a senior product designer with the challenge of helping conceive the new Dell Design System. Although the new one would be called Version 2, it was a completely new product built from scratch, with 3 main goals:

  • Create a new, consistent, and accessible user experience for Dell products
  • Eliminate repeated effort by becoming the only design system at Dell
  • Increase design system adoption across teams at Dell

Components & Foundations

As a senior product designer, I joined the squad of Foundations & Components, a team of 8 designers responsible for the core delivery of the Dell Design System. Working often with a pair, I delivered 10 of the first 16 components released in the alpha version of the new design system.

The goal was to achieve component parity with version 1 so teams could redesign and rebuild their applications using the new design system, and our team achieved that before the expected deadline. In a recent talk, I stated why I'd choose a different approach today, creating the ideal experience and extracting patterns and components from that.

Set of first components I designed initially for the new Dell Design System.

My work significantly contributed to the visual enhancements across all Dell experiences. By refining design elements and integrating modern, user-friendly aesthetics, we made Dell's digital presence more engaging and intuitive.

Comparison of DDS 1 and DDS 2 websites.

Lead Product Designer

Less than a year after joining, due to my involvement in multiple initiatives and previous deliveries, I was promoted to Lead Product Designer for the squad. Since then, I have led 4 to 8 designers, as the number varies based on effort relocation. From that moment, my key contributions were:

  • Assistance for team designers;
  • Direct collaboration with Design Director, Product Manager, and Lead Engineer;
  • Support adoption and implementation of the design system company-wide;
  • Design strategy and decision making;
  • Assistance in hiring and onboarding new team members.

Leo is an exceptional Design System specialist, owning our Foundations & Components design practice with a deep talent in typography and color foundations. His work elevates design with precision and creativity, ensuring accessible, cohesive, user-friendly components. [...] Highly recommend Leo for his visionary approach and impact on our teams, it's a pleasure to work with him.

Pedro Prado, Senior Product Manager at Dell Design System

Design Process

The design system was divided into three squads. The one I was part of, Foundations & Components, was the largest, as we delivered the core product. Since the beginning, I advocated for a standard and structured but not restrained design process. I partnered up with other designers, engineers, and our content writer to create the ideal “handoff documentation”.

Later, I started a map of deliverables categorized into Discovery, Framing, Exploration, and Delivery. This map consisted of a brief description, expected outcomes, and our best previous examples.

Adoption & Support

Being part of a design system will always involve helping teams to adopt your product. For less experienced designers, or even teams with no designers, the challenge is especially hard but also rewarding. During this time, once a week or more I’ve helped teams as a design system consultant, explaining the benefits, how to adopt, and overall best practices, not necessarily related to the design system but design itself.

Results

In the last measurement, from 2023 to 2024, we increase the number of products using the Dell Design System by 46%. The users of our new product have reported from 20 to 50% time reduction in the design and development of new experiences. Better than the increase in speed, these teams are now creating consistent, accessible, and brand-aligned experiences by consuming our foundations, components, and patterns.

  • 46%

    increase in adoption from 2023 to 2024

    (Latest measurement)
  • 70

    Score at SUS
    (System Usability Scale)

    (Latest measurement)
  • 20–50%

    reduction in design and development time reported by users

  • 100%

    accessible and brand-aligned experiences

In September of 2023, after leading the squad of Foundations & Components for two years, I was promoted to Principal Product Designer and received the responsibility of leading design for the whole Dell Design System.