Not all design systems are SaaS-focused, and I’m thrilled today to share some lessons from e-comm. This was an enlightening episode with a good aha moment for me! If you’re an e-comm design system person, let me and Maya know in the comments how you think it’s different than SaaS, we’d love to hear from you!
🎧 listen to Episode #04 with Maya Hampton on her lessons from building for e-comm at REI and Lululemon
Read on for a peek into the episode.
Maya Hampton draws on her experience as a design systems PM at both REI and lululemon to explore what makes ecommerce design systems distinct. From the component library decisions to supporting editorial flexibility and brand storytelling, this episode digs into the real differences between ecommerce systems and other product contexts — and what's driving non-tech companies to invest in designs systems now.
Maya
At Lululemon, we have a mandate to adopt the design system. I thought that would make my job a lot easier as a PM, right? Because that's what we're accountable for. But I think what was surprising is that in some ways it's actually made it harder.
The scope is different, e-commerce exists in a larger ecosystem for brand. That includes store design, package design, hang tags, as well as other digital marketing channels that would benefit from the same brand layers. So there's coordination between the online experience, the in-store experience.
We're working within a larger ecosystem. Digital is an organization. It is not the entire product. Like a SaaS company, everything is within that tech space. But in digital, we're also working with retail teams. We're working with those physical product design teams. The playbook looks different.
Elyse
You were talking about how the team that owns the product page, and obviously in e-comm, you instrument clicks, behavior, you want to understand how your users and customers are using your software. The team that owns the product details page knows a ton about how people are using the product details page.
Given that you're in a PM role, how is that information coming back to you, to the design system? What user behavior information is relevant, and how does that affect what components you provide?
Maya
I mean, I think it's a great pipeline for us to keep the system fresh and know what those needs are.
So at Lululemon we're building the product tile and the product carousels, we're building a lot of different variants. And then, we’re building color swatches and states. And so we really need to partner with the PMs on those teams to understand like, what needs to click through? Are we gonna totally break conversion rates if you suddenly can't click through on a color swatch? If you choose a color in a product and then you click through the product page, it should show the product with that color already selected, right?
What needs to carry through? What's important? What's the level of metadata? So we made a lot of different variants of the metadata, depending where it shows up. If it's the recommendation on a page, here's some products that you looked at, it'll show you the specific product, the SKU, the color maybe that you looked at. If it's somewhere on the homepage and it's more of a catchall, you're going to have more options within it.
There's been tests about like, should the product name be bolded, or should the brand name be bolded, or should it be the price be bolded. And like we did an audit at REI, and across the entire flow, it was inconsistent in every product card, right? But each team also did their own testing!
As the design system we can help elevate those patterns that are working, or even like, hey, we just saw this other team testing something very similar, maybe you haven't talked to them. So I think we can help be the bridge.
But then I think my principle is like, let the teams, experiment with the stuff in their space that's really unique to their space and their domain, 'cause they know it best.
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