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Background
Background
Currency, the design system of M&T Bank and Wilmington Trust, is the official design and development guidance for both brands. Currency was gaining a grassroots base of adopters and, at the same time, attempting to garner more investment from leadership.
But the design system was operating in stealth mode. Boots-on-the-ground practitioners were unclear about what updates the Currency team was making and on what cadence. Leadership didn't know the direct benefits to their teams. Currency was losing trust and failing to gain more investment. We needed to build transparency and confidence within our base and showcase the wins that the system facilitated.
The info here is a deep dive into the process of creating the Currency comms strategy. Feel free to skip around.
What I did
What I did
Audit the current state
Audit the current state
The first step in solving the problem was getting a full understanding of it. I started with an audit of existing channels and touchpoints. I used these metrics to establish a baseline:
Who we were talking to the most and the least
What channels people looked for design system info in
How often people had to repeat themselves in different channels before getting an answer
How often questions went unanswered for more than five days
I observed that we had a closer relationship with design than we did with our dev partners. The design team and the Currency team were in the same UX department at the company. Because of our proximity, designers had to do very little to seek us out.
Developers often had to go through their designers if they had design system questions. The designers would ask Currency and then relay messages back. If devs had no UX design support, they had to dig to uncover avenues of access. Often they sent many emails before reaching a member of the Currency team.
Moreover, we had no channels open to practitioner-adjacent folks, like product owners and researchers. However, these roles often relied on the state of the design system and its offerings to scope, prioritize, and plan work. I had to include them in an ideal-state strategy.
Apply quick wins
Apply quick wins
To combat the lack of access to the Currency team, I implemented some quick wins. One of these wins was creating a Currency email alias and adding it to the documentation site for maximum visibility. I also created an open Currency team on Microsoft Teams, where the entire corporation could communicate. I organized channels within the team to focus on design and development, but left them brand-agnostic. This fostered collaboration and visibility between brands. Then, I created tags to make sure that specialized messages would reach their intended audiences without creating silos.
Create a messaging matrix
Create a messaging matrix
After highlighting the gaps, it was time to address them systematically. I looked at the outcomes we wanted to achieve and mapped them to the messages that we needed to send to accomplish that.
Example 1:
To increase trust and decrease user drop-off, we have to:
Make system changes and enhancements on a predictable basis
Communicate with our users what's changing and how it might affect them
Give users ample warning of changes beforehand and support after the fact
For our practitioners, the communications cadence was frequent since their usage was frequent. We communicated with them often to make sure the system was working for them and they always knew what to expect.
Some outcomes relied on leadership. For example, increased investment and increased business alignment. I had to be careful to cater the cadence and volume of leadership communications to the capacity of those stakeholders.
Example 2:
To increase leadership investment, we have to:
Show them the system is making their employees' work easier and more efficient
Celebrate what we've accomplished
Demonstrate the reach and benefits of the system
In practice, that meant sending messages that were short, easy to scan, and immediately showed the value that the design system provided.
Create actionable artifacts
Create actionable artifacts
From this exercise, I created a communications calendar for Currency. The comms calendar outlined all planned touchpoints for the year and their related outcomes. It's primary purpose was to be a tool for the Currency team, but I published it for the entire org. This visibility helped create transparency and set expectations.
The calendar listed communications at all altitudes.
Regular practitioner communications like weekly Currency syncs for user feedback and requests,
Monthly combined brand syncs for cross-brand visibility
Monthly release announcements and demos for awareness of the system as a product.
Quarterly leadership communications
I also created a template and a backlog for the quarterly leadership communication to rotate through success stories pertaining to system adoption and maturation, as well as user contribution to continually show a return on investment.
This strategy provided a framework for planned communications so that I could deliver the right information to the right user at the right time.
Outputs and outcomes
Outputs and outcomes
I published release notes on the docsite and announced them in Teams with each release without fail. A predictable cadence had many positive outcomes:
Increased user awareness of the system without having to hunt down information
Decreased the number of questions coming in about the status of the system
I wrote a quarterly C-notes newsletter. These were short and sweet leadership messages, with a rotating success story to keep stakeholders aware of the design system's benefits without inundating them.
Unmonitored adoption dropped drastically as people started using the Currency email address. New adopters emailed with questions and we could answer their queries and add them to the Currency community on teams. I added 14 new members to the Teams channels in the first month.
We fostered a culture where people could design and develop in the open. We solidified the Teams channels and combined syncs as places where Currency subscribers could talk shop. Currency became a forum for sharing ideas and bouncing off each other, regardless of brand or product. This inevitably resulted in greater product cohesion across the M&T family.
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