Edison Design System
Quality begins from the inside out. As designers we are creators of styles, patterns, and design systems that ultimately increase product consistency for the end users, development time for engineers, as well as the overall product scalability. The logic behind the design system is to make it usable across organizations by organizing the components to find and use them quickly.
The Edison Design System delivers consistent, simple, modern, trustworthy and intuitive components to be used across the full range of General Electric's digital products.
In order to achieve the long term success required, the design team shifted our frame of mind internally. Rather than thinking of final applications as our sole responsibility, we recognized that the design system is what underpins our final products and pattern libraries. A well designed internal system maximizes productivity and efficiency across teams and for the product.
As a consultant and design system evangelist, I was brought to General Electric to lead their efforts upgrading and governing the Edison Design System. In this role I began with the change management of the legacy design system by speaking to Product Managers, Designers and Engineering leads to uncover the issues they faced when building products as well as the known issues of the legacy system.
Once problems and key objectives were refined my focus shifted to redesigning components, adding missing but necessary components, and architecting the system of components spread out across five different libraries. With a realigned design system better progress is being made on the agreed upon objectives. The Edison Design System is no longer legacy, but more robust and inclusive.