Procore: Design Guidelines Migration (In Progress)

Summary

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Important Note: This case study is currently under construction. Please reach out for details past the summary as this is also an ongoing project. Thanks for your understanding!

At-a-Glance	ㅤ
Company	Procore
Role	Senior Product Designer (Project Lead)
Project Length	In progress
Team	Three product designers; design manager; team of senior, staff, and principal designers; engineering partners
Year	2024 (current)

Procore’s Design System Documentation is a work in progress. The public domain exists as a bespoke website, which is excellent for customization, but makes collaboration a pain point. Enter the great Design System Documentation Migration, a project that I am currently leading in order to help our documentation evolve.

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At-a-Glance: I’m leading the Design System Documentation Migration, which is an effort to improve the usability of the design system itself for our designers. Two of us are in charge of auditing and reducing design and development debt; the third is in charge of implementing, moving, and delivering our updates. The goals include, but are not limited to: implementing a new documentation template; moving to a closed server to allow for internal examples to be featured in the documentation; and creating a roadmap to import different sections based on prioritization.

Background

Procore maintains more spaces for documentation than is strictly necessary. There is a public website that needs to be maintained; a massive document in Figma that sometimes acts as both a draft and a final; a set of development guidelines; a sandbox of developed components; and of course, the everyday back-and-forth support that the Design System team provides the greater design organization.

The Problems

The Goal

The ultimate goal is to eventually move the design system off of the bespoke public website and onto an internal tool that seamlessly connects design and development. However, we’re in very early days, and it will likely be a few quarters before we move to the new home in earnest. For now, though, we have an excellent “in-between” space that is working as our current single source of truth.

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Phase 1 Goals: Understand current pain points for designers and design system team pain points to update the guidelines regularly; test the outline for new guideline content. Phase 2 Goals: Locate an “in-between” space for internal guidelines as a current single source of truth; prioritize new and updated guidelines; and migrate existing guidelines as-is.

The Solution (for now)

We’re in the process of the migration and have moved to an in-between tool that connects our design system work with our engineering partners. It also blends our product partners’ work!

The temporary “office” has greatly reduced the amount of time it takes our design system team to audit and update guidelines. The design org as a whole is also beginning to find their feet now that there’s a single place that they know will be updated. Time will tell!

✨ Pride Point

This has been one of my biggest projects yet, and it was one that received positive feedback during a Design Quality and Excellence Review meeting. My team and I presented to design and product leaders throughout the org. The presentation allowed us more leeway to keep doing the work to reduce design debt, increase design system usability, and pave pathways for more open collaboration with the design org.

Shoutout to Keri Martin, one of the best designers I’ve ever worked with, who pioneered this project and supplied much of the research we needed to find the right direction.

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This is a developing case study! Come back later for more info.

🫖 Would you like to hear more?

Drop me a line at hello@robbinarcega.com and I’d love to chat!