Process for
design consistency
What are the OST and its process for design consistency
I was the first designer hired to build design consistency of Microsoft’s Cloud + A.I. suite in 2018. Over the years, I was able to grow the team to 15 people size. And the name of the group is Operation Suiteness Studio(OST).
Digital Transformation Studio(DTS) has Azure Data, Dynamics365, Power Platforms. These product groups have so many sub-products. The OST impacts 60+ products under the suite. It’s impossible to provide on-demand, ad-hoc consistency prescriptions to individual products.
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A systematic and sustainable approach is the only way to success
OST is always working with our principle, process, and product.
These are OST’s products
1. Next design vision
2. Product audit
3. Toolkits and guidance
4. Collaboration channels
5. Playbooks
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Principles & Playbooks
When it comes to design consistency, having principles is vital. Without constructive principles, achieving systematic cohesion is hard to reach. To build a design system on top of the robust ground, my team and I built series of playbooks for people to follow and engage.
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OST’s general principles
Our vision is to help our studio partners create experiences that feel familiar and unified across apps and platforms. We’re big on collaboration. In fact, we facilitate and support everyone to achieve next-level quality and consistency for all of our customers.
Designers, engineers, and producers collaborate harmoniously
Open-source approach for consistency
Build design on shared technology
One Microsoft
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OST’s playbooks
* Can not disclose more details
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Timelines
Always plan first before engaging. Transparently sharing high-level yearly plans and detailed workstreams schedules are helping OST and designers who have a dependency on the design system.
Carefully planned projects that bring more design consistency into the system
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A central hub
Working hard for consistency is just a part of the process. Once the work is done, sharing artifacts across the studio effectively is getting more critical.
I built the OST Sharepoint site that becomes the central hub of everything the team does.
It has all the contents that OST populated and related information links. Such as tutorial videos, toolkits and guides, intake forms, playbooks and previous OST presentation recordings.
