127. Building a Unified Design System for Instacart’s Multi-Product Ecosystem: Lessons for Success from Miranda Bouck
Feb 4, 2025
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Miranda Bouck, a Staff Product Designer at Instacart, shares insights on crafting a unified design system for a vast array of consumer and enterprise needs. She discusses the challenges of harmonizing diverse user experiences while maintaining system flexibility. The conversation highlights the importance of balancing customization and simplicity to enhance user accessibility. Miranda also sheds light on navigating multi-platform design and the role of efficient systems in fostering collaboration within a large organization like Instacart.
Instacart's design system utilizes a modular approach, balancing standardization and customization to meet diverse user needs across a multi-product ecosystem.
The team employs a data-driven strategy to refine components, ensuring the design system evolves in alignment with user demands and partner requirements.
Deep dives
Overview of Instacart's Design System
The Instacart design system is structured to cater to various user groups, including consumers, shoppers, and enterprise partners. It supports a two-sided marketplace, allowing different interfaces to serve both customers ordering groceries and users picking items. This dual functionality requires a design system that maintains a consistent experience while adapting to the unique needs of each user segment, which includes themes tailored for major retailers. The integration of multiple user experiences under a single framework highlights the complexity and versatility of the design system.
Component Flexibility and Customization
Instacart's design system emphasizes flexibility through a modular approach to components, allowing adaptations for various usage contexts. Components are designed to function across different environments, like consumer apps and retailer interfaces, while maintaining core functionalities. By providing smart defaults and customization options, smaller retailers can leverage the system without needing extensive design resources, ensuring a consistent yet personalized shopping experience. This balance between standardization and customization is critical for supporting both large brands and local businesses.
User-Centered Design Considerations
In developing the design system, Instacart prioritizes the distinct needs of its diverse user base, which includes interaction differences between consumers and shoppers. For instance, input designs have been optimized based on the context in which they are used, with careful attention paid to details like text size and color relevant to user tasks. This user-centered approach helps to create intuitive experiences that cater to the specific requirements of various roles within the platform. Meaningful communication with designers from partner retailers informs the continuous refinement of components.
Data-Driven Design Improvements
Instacart actively collects and analyzes data to enhance its design system, monitoring how components are utilized across different retailer sites. This data-driven strategy enables the team to identify trends and user requests, ensuring that the system evolves in sync with partner needs. Additionally, the design team employs both automated telemetry and manual tracking to gather insights about component usage, which informs prioritization decisions for future updates. By leveraging real-world data, the design system can better align with the unique demands of various retail partners.
Increasingly, design systems need to support multi-product ecosystems with a diverse array of consumers and stakeholders. This week, Chris Strahl sits down with Miranda Bouck from Instacart to explore the intricacies of managing a multi-faceted design system. Miranda delves into the challenges and strategies of balancing the diverse needs of consumer apps, internal apps, and enterprise retail partners, all while maintaining system flexibility and performance. Learn how Instacart's small but mighty design system team effectively supports a vast network of designers, developers, and business partners. Tune in for a fascinating discussion on pushing the boundaries of design systems in a complex ecosystem.
Guest Miranda is a Staff Product Designer at Instacart, working on the Instacart Design System, Pantry. Her aim: build products that create an accessible, logical, and predictable user experience. Blueberries. They're always in my cart.
Host Chris Strahl is co-founder and CEO of Knapsack, host of @TheDSPod, DnD DM, and occasional river guide. You can find Chris on Twitter as @chrisstrahl and on LinkedIn. Sponsor Sponsored by Knapsack, the design system platform that brings teams together. Learn more at knapsack.cloud.
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