Coursera Design System (CDS)
Organisational challenges
Coursera has seen rapid growth over the last six years, which has caused inconsistencies across the verticals. Compounded by the need for rapid iterations in build, the website has become inconsistent and, in some places, unintuitive. Coursera Design team operated in verticals, with no shared vision on experience outcome or measurable criteria. The lack of shared principles, brand guidelines, content style guide, and design system resulted in a fragmented experience with high design and technical debt.
Initiatives
My role at Coursera was to hire and lead a team that can work with all design verticals and cross-functional to set the path for a robust foundation that unifies and uplift Coursera design experience.
- I’ve hired design talents with various skills and experience in building design systems, accessibility, and internationalization.
- I’ve Partnered with the Brand team on Coursera’s new brand identity and how it translates into a brand experience.
- Led on design principles, system foundation, and objectives that create a shared vision and measurable results.
- Work closely with content design to consolidate content guidelines that align with principles and bran
- Leading on alignment framework across design organization that ensures Coursera design system serves for both cohesion and context.
- Working with multi-disciplinary teams that align on tools and methods, i.e., Jira, confluence, Storybook.
Outcome
- Release the 1.0 version of the design system combined with in-depth documentation which supports internationalization (RTL)
- Continues releases for the brand initiative across the experience
- One code repository
- Figma library assets that used across all design vertical
- Support multi-stream of adoption in several teams product vertical
- Accessibility and internationalization
- Guidelines and principles
- The alignment framework, so the system can be community-driven and enable teams to build into themselves.