Building the Foundation for a New Design Workflow
Every library grows a little at a time, and over the years GM’s four in-vehicle libraries had each grown their own way. A new way of working was about to make that matter.
Company
General Motors
Role
Visual Designer, Cadillac In-Vehicle Displays; later recruited to the Advanced Design Group (Employee)
Situation
I was a few months into my time on Cadillac’s in-vehicle displays team when I noticed the same pattern across all four of GM’s brands. Each library had its own structure. Components lived in different places, icons weren’t consistently componentized, and items sat at different levels of the hierarchy from one brand to the next. Part of every design review went to pointing newer designers to the current version of a component, and some work got redone simply because someone had pulled an older one.
None of it was dramatic. It was a small, steady cost every designer paid without really noticing it.
Insight
The libraries worked well enough that fixing them hadn’t been a priority. What changed was the timing: GM’s design org was about to roll out an agile workflow that would ask designers to move across brands, and four differently structured libraries would make that harder than it needed to be.
So I asked for twenty minutes at the next design review to walk through a plan for bringing them together.
Decision
I led a task force of four designers, one per brand, and we rebuilt all four libraries in parallel, checking each other’s work as we went. The goal was libraries close enough that a designer could move from one brand to another without relearning the system, while leaving room, about ten percent, for what made each brand distinct.
Outcome
When the agile workflow rolled out, the infrastructure was already there and already familiar, so the transition went smoothly. Review time went back to design feedback, and nobody had to learn a new way of working and a new file structure at the same time.
This was the first project at GM that I initiated and led. What I took from it was the value of bringing a clear plan to a problem everyone shares, even when it isn’t formally part of your role.