Nebula

ADT provides residential customers with electronic security, fire protection, and other related alarm monitoring and smart home products and services throughout the United States. The ADT Experience Lab team provides product and UX design for the ADT Products group.

Design System Name

• Nebula

Design System team size

• 1-3 persons

Design System team make-up

• Designers
• Engineers
• Content designer

Governance model

• Centralized

Means to ease collaboration

We use a variety of means to enable and nurture collaboration on our design system. We have dedicated channels in both Slack and Microsoft Teams, where all stakeholders can collaborate on various aspects of the system. The design system team is active in sharing information and inviting collaboration via these channels. We also hold regular collaborative workshops for the design system with varied stakeholders, including designers, engineers, and product folks. These are usually live video meetings in Microsoft Teams that are recorded and reviewed. These workshops are inclusive and cross-disciplinary, so that everyone’s ideas are heard and discussed. Finally, we use Jira to track additions and changes to the Nebula design system. Those tickets are managed just like any other task in our normal agile process, so everyone can keep track of the state of the system and its documentation. Anyone on any team can create tickets for Nebula, which are then triaged and workshopped by the Nebula team, involving additional stakeholders from other teams as needed.

The primary way we’ve adapted our collaboration strategy is to simply increase the frequency of our collaboration and to provide more channels for collaboration. As the Products group has grown and incorporated new skillsets, the need for collaboration is greater than ever. By doing more workshops, centralizing documentation in zeroheight, adding Nebula-specific channels in Slack and Microsoft Teams, incorporating Nebula into our Jira process, etc., we’ve created a comprehensive, dynamic, friction-free, and inclusive collaboration process that is working well to move Nebula (and by extension, ADT products themselves) forward.

An Example of How Collaboration Creates Success at ADT

Collaboration results

Collaboration on Nebula has undoubtedly increased the quality of the design system. The primary benefits we’ve seen from building a comprehensive design system are increased consistency within and between products and increased efficiency of product development. With Nebula, ADT has been able to deliver a major app update initiative in a fraction of the time it would have taken without Nebula (or with a lower-quality version of Nebula). So, getting to market faster with products that users love is the ultimate result of our collaboration process on Nebula. And this result creates even more positive impact across the company, such as in employee retention, hiring quality, and bottom-line financial results for the company.

Because the design system impacts almost every aspect of product development, collaborating on it has positively increased the amount of cross-team communication that occurs. This in turn, increases the quality of our products, as everyone has a better shared vision of what we’re trying to accomplish. This is also a virtuous circle, as the increase in communication and collaboration feeds back into improvements in the design system itself, which then increases the quality of our products, and so on. The design system is what all teams depend on in common, so it has really brought all the teams closer together and made everyone more efficient and productive as a result.

Collaborating on Nebula has increased the overall quality of ADT’s products in several ways. By hearing different perspectives on particular problems and solutions (such as from design, research, engineering, and product), we can find solutions that hit the “sweet spot” in meeting the needs of all those groups, and ultimately delight users. Collaboration has also increased efficiency by ensuring that we don’t pursue solutions that don’t meet the needs of some stakeholders. Collaboration has helped us avoid bad paths and zero in on the best solutions more quickly. The end result is greater efficiency in both developing and utilizing our design system, and ultimate in creating higher-quality products faster.

A key element of our collaboration on Nebula that has increased consistency is bringing together Nebula documentation into zeroheight. Now, we have a “single source of truth” that everyone has access to, that provides clear guidance on exactly how all design elements (colors, typography, components, etc.) should be used. This documentation builds shared vision of design principles and intent, in addition to the specifics of individual components. And because stakeholders from different disciplines all contribute to the documentation, we can achieve a level of consistency that wouldn’t be possible if that collaboration didn’t exist.

Collaboration impact

The biggest impact of our collaboration on Nebula has been increased quality of ADT’s products. Because the design system forms the foundation upon which our products are built, getting everyone involved in creating that foundation has increased the quality of the design system. And when you have a high-quality design system, it becomes much easier to create quality products that users love and that have a positive impact on ADT’s bottom line. Without the cross-disciplinary collaboration, Nebula would not be nearly as good as it is, and our products would reflect that. So, collaboration on Nebula is really the seed from which future positive results for ADT will grow!

It became obvious that our collaboration efforts were successful when we began to receive unsolicited feedback about Nebula from outside the design team. Because we’ve placed a strong emphasis on collaborating on Nebula, the design system has simply become part of the DNA of everyone involved in product development. When product is brainstorming new product or feature ideas, the impact of Nebula on those ideas (and vice-versa) are front of mind. The same applies when engineering is working out technical solutions that might require changes to Nebula — they provide that feedback early and everyone stays in sync.

I believe our focus on involving stakeholders from outside the design team in Nebula workshops was the key step in enabling successful collaboration of all kinds. When those stakeholders began to work directly with full-time design system team members in a live format, and saw that their voices were not only heard but valued, all our other forms of collaboration also took off. This was really the turning point in creating a cross-disciplinary “meta” team for our design system. Another key step was documenting the design system in zeroheight. Now, all the information about Nebula is in one place and centrally accessible to all stakeholders. No more fragmentation of information across too many tools. zeroheight brings everyone together and keeps us all on the same page.