Datadog Design System Redesign
Improved design system for hundreds of Datadog engineers and customer companies with complex enterprise-level use cases.
Executive Summary
Datadog is a monitoring and analytics tool for information technology (IT) and DevOps teams. The DesignOps team maintains DRUIDS (Datadog’s design system) and is a consulting team for design decisions on all product teams.
During this time, I was a key designer leading initiatives on the re-design of DRUIDS including: dark mode re-design, better component descriptions in Figma, and component detail page re-designs. Most of my contributions have been shipped and/or incorporated.
Timeline:
3 months (May 2023 - August 2023)
My role:
Product Design Intern
Project type:
Design System Modifications + Design Tools
Projects Summaries
During this project, I worked closely with the design system team designers plus more to improve the language of components descriptions in Figma.
During this project, I worked closely with designers on my team and beyond to refresh an outdated Dark Mode that hadn’t been updated since 2019.
1 | Component Description Improvements
Problem Statement: With multiple design teams, diverse products, and rapid scaling at Datadog, designers faced several significant challenges:
Differentiating between components
Unclear component features
Manually cross-referencing documentation
These obstacles compounded the difficulty of delivering cohesive, high-quality designs, especially in a fast-paced environment.
My Solution: I, along with my team, improved the design system by conducting an internal audit of components being used by ALL design teams. We retired and introduced new components as needed, providing informative language as needed in those descriptions.
Blurred for NDA purposes
2 | Dark Mode Redesign
Problem Statement: As a rapidly scaling company, Datadog is no stranger to Dark Mode. Upon joining, there was a Dark Mode already in place, but with its own issues:
It hasn’t been updated since conception (2019)
Unclear hierarchy if importance
WCAG Compliance Issues (Contrast + more)
These obstacles compounded the difficulty of delivering cohesive, high-quality designs, especially in a fast-paced environment.
My Solution: After working closely with engineers at Datadog, conducting market research, applying updated WCAG standards, I summarized essential details to update in Dark Mode to improve the usability of Dark Mode for hundreds of essential users of Datadog.
Blurred for NDA purposes
Impact
Ultimately, why does this even matter?
DesignOps is primarily an internal team dealing with tools that designers and engineers at Datadog use. This isn’t completely true, though. DesignOps manages how all products at Datadog operate in regards to design and the design system, but especially with the main personas: Management and Engineers. For that reason the impact of decisions made in projects such as the few above are the following:
100+
Product Designers interacting with Datadog’s Design System daily
40k+
Clients using Datadog’s software designed with this Design System
To learn more contact me at mzmartinez065@gmail.com or message me on LinkedIn
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