Quantum Design System

Thales is a global technology leader with more than 77,000 employees on five continents. The Group is investing in digital and “deep tech” innovations – Big Data, artificial intelligence, connectivity, cybersecurity and quantum technology – to build a future we can all trust. In the markets of defence and security, aerospace and space, digital identity and security, and transport, Thales provides solutions, services and products to help its customers – companies, organisations and governments – to carry out their critical missions.

Design System Name

• Quantum Design System

Design System team size

• 43 (7 Core team and  36 Guild members = contributors)

Design System team make-up

• Designers
• Engineers
• Product Owner/Manager

Governance model

• Hybrid

Means to ease collaboration

Our mantra is test and learn, we always seek to improve and make evolving our ways-of-working and collaboration practices. During the project’s scoping, the Core team involved key designers/developers to make inventories, analyze what we should target and while also co-defining Quantum vision (Design principles, Design System parameters…) Once the prod was launched, we started with Public demos every 2 weeks for 1 year (and capturing feedback on the fly), then we organized a 1 day hackathon. Quantum Core team hosted a hybrid hackathon event, physically located in Paris, enhanced by remote contributions from early adopters to test the Design System first release. Designers and developers were invited to address the following challenges in 6 hours:

1. Designers: Redesigning famous digital products from the market by using Quantum Design System and showing efficiency to design under tight schedule. 
2. Developers: Migrate the project of their choice to Quantum or Contribute to Quantum by developing a core component of the backlog. 

After this hackathon we have launched pilot projects, the first Thales projects which were starting to use Quantum. The Core team collaborated with those teams to see how the Design System was used, capturing feedback, better understanding limitations and driving evolutions of the Design System according to Thales businesses. Then we provided Master class sessions; a series of Figma x Quantum Design masterclasses delivered virtually by the Quantum Design Lead to support adoption of Quantum and Figma Design tool at Thales. 

After 12 months we put in place a new ritual for Guild members called Guild series (1-hour monthly meeting with all the Guild members + Core team to collaborate during quick workshops, making demos of contrib achievements, sharing/feedback/ questions and prioritising the next candidates of the backlog). Several times per year the Core team hosts Quantum co-design workshops and invite designers/developers to scope more business-oriented components (ex: maps/cartography for air traffic managementor challenge the contribution model).

More details about Quantum Guild: The Quantum Guild programme involves decentralized active members from around Thales organization to participate in Quantum Design System acceleration, deployment and quality.

The Core team and the Guild members represent the Quantum team and are in charge of collaborating and delivering the Design System that Thales needs for Digital territory.

This hybrid model is based on the Design System organization pattern standards to break the silos, perform pair review on the deliveries while also boosting the contribution and increasing the number of assets in the Quantum common bucket.

The Core team put in place feedback management systems (issue management on GitLab + Figma comment feature) to track, analyze issues and while also providing workarounds in order to support the user or fix and close the issues. Over time, we noticed that users of the Design System (designers and developers) were communicating between them without the intermediary of the Core team. To enhance communication from Core team to the community, we put in place a Newsletter and public communication channels. 

More recently, according to users’ feedback we launched other initiatives:

• Launch of Quantum youtube channel with a series of tutorials
• Launch of Quantum training programmes
• Launch of Support service offers (1 day workshop to solve Thales project challenges by Design + Co-sprint with the Core team to spread best practices)
• Design Office Hours, dedicated time slot organized on a weekly basis to allow any designers to get support and grow around Quantum. It is also a moment of sharing, co-design and learning to allow collaborators to raise their issues and design challenges on specific topics.

We improved and extended how we support and collaborate around the Design System over time (test and learn according to designers/developers needs and the evolving Design System maturity increase). At the beginning, during project’s scoping, the collaboration was only with key people from the Thales organization (Core team and supporters, at that time 10 people). We made many workshops to frame the Design System (vision, design principles, DS parameters, audits, roadmap, risk mitigation…). After 2 months, we decided to start designing/implementing the Design System and making demos to the all community (Agile scrum 2 weeks sprints). After 12 months of prod, we have started to launch co-design/mob-programming sessions and workshops with a wide audience (beyond the Guild) and while also creating dedicated guidelines to guide users on how to contribute, how to design new components and how to design templates.

Collaboration results

More and more comments/ feedbacks/ issues have been raised over time, people respond to each other, people from other countries, from other business units  are starting to work/collaborate together.
Increase of  people who are joining the Guild, and more contributions are published in the scope of the Design System. People launch and lead workshops and collaborative sessions by themselves (the Core team provides support when needed, but they own the workshops/initiatives).

We noticed how the collaboration process helped with consistency between our teams and project when there was consistency across all Thales digital solutions.

In just 18 months, Quantum natively re-aligned 111 Thales products to the common system, creating a sense of unity. All the patterns of use and the styles converge now to same direction regardless teams entities or backgrounds.

As a result, 132 projects (inc. 111 products) have been made by using Quantum (223 designers, 508 developers use the Design System libraries – 1,8k users consume the documentation each month) Quantum Core team also conducted research campaigns with designer/developer users across Thales to understand Thales GBU/entities digital challenges, pains & new expectationsThe team measured Quantum usability & satisfaction levels through validated surveys. As a matter of fact the level of quality of Quantum assets has been evaluated as excellent by the users (last NPS 55, Last SUS 79,09). 

Testimonies: 

• “…with Quantum, you’re sure to find the right component for the job “.
• “…it’s rich in terms of configurations, with a wide range of cases to choose from. “
• “With Quantum (…) you’ve got a whole range of tools – typos, buttons, colors – so you don’t have to worry about redoing them every time. “
• The creation of variants really simplifies things (…) it’s a step that’s already been done.
• “I love making components in Figma and I love using them, it’s very satisfying”
• “It’s very easy to use to create the component, it’s just assembling existing bricks. “
• “The uniformity of variants and properties is well done. “
• “simple to use, components are named in a rather natural way “
• “Quantum is strategic for us in that it gives us a means of standardizing our interfaces and simplifying access to design and development resources. At last, we have a standard brand that is common to all our business units. In addition to everything that Quantum brings to us as a Design System, I would also say that it’s a way of creating a link between the entities and towards the group, so we work more closely and in a more coordinated way, even if we still have a long way to go. “ “Quantum gives us a common direction, and we’re all working together.”*
• “Quantum provides a shared vision and support for our design. Not only is our transition to high-fidelity mock-ups greatly accelerated, but Quantum inspires us and enables us to propose advanced designs whatever our design skills. It also allows us to standardize our productions, so the teams we work with have a rough idea of what our final design might look like, and I think this contributes to a successful digital experience. “

Collaboration impact

The Design System breaks the silos across the organization and creates a sense of community and unity among Thales designers/developers. We can address and solve complex design challenges, federate people on topics of interest and involve experts from the all company – One Thales, one Design System, one team.

We considered ​​our design system collaboration had a significant impact when people started to lead contributions on their own. A good example is the Quantum Guild Programme that empower designers around the Design System.. In 2022, we empowered several Design teams on strategic topics in order to cover the diverse range of use-cases across the business and extend Quantum accordingly: 

• Dataviz (cross business units) – Datavisualization or Dataviz encompasses data & information which are displayed through smart and abstract representations in order to reinforce user’s instant understanding, big picture, data correlation and awareness. Over the past few years, Dataviz became more and more ubiquitous in the Thales digital journeys for tracking, among other things KPIs (ex: manufacturing efficiency, on-time delivery, forecasting, system health and monitoring…). This contribution project aimed to initiate the Quantum Dataviz responsive library and provide a PowerBI tool distribution. 
• Touch buttons library (DIS business unit) – More and more digital products require touch interactions such as kiosk or tablet devices. This initiative intended to deliver a Touch button library and better guide how to Design for Touch experiences. 
• Maps exploration – Maps or cartographies are really strategic in the Thales digital journeys for visualising geo-referenced data (space constellations monitoring, air traffic management, military field operations…). The map/cartography topic has been defined close to the business during a dedicated workshop which included all the Guild members. This collaborative session was key to scope what we should cover regarding map in Quantum Design System. -Cards component exploration
• The card topic has been defined and scoped close to the business during a dedicated workshop which included all the Guild members.

Examples of workshop which have been made with the Guild: