Rabbit Design System

Rabbit Design System is a customized, special-use multimodality design system for Driver Experience products.

Using voice, touch, text, and haptic feedback, the multimodal design combines different modalities to create better user experiences.

Role

Design System Management & Strategy

UX/UI Design

Documentation

Accessibility

Time

2020-2023

Milestones

Migration

Successfully migrate 90% product to RDS in one year

Auto

Upgraded the system to support smart car experience

Dark Mode

Launched the Dark Mode in the U.S. market in one year

Documentation

Live-streaming documentation website and best practice of migration guideline

Problem

Through 2015, Amazon Last Mile Delivery lacked any formalized design system. Instead, brands existed on the mobile and web as separate identities, with individual teams creating their source of standards for UI elements, components, or modules–in both internal and outside tools.

What we found:

  • Conflicting guidelines and direction.

  • Duplication of standard components.

  • Inconsistencies across mobile and websites.

  • Pressure for agile solutions without discovery and research.

  • Siloed teams working with disjointed communication.

Challenges

Piecemeal approaches to technology and design have created fragmented workflows and inconsistent user experiences across the globe.

01. Global

With 275,000 drivers working in 20 countries and delivering more than 10 million customer packages daily, we need a system that can manage a diverse cultural and language range.

02. Flexible

Planned to launch 100,000 custom electric delivery vehicles (Rivian) in over 100 cities. We had to ensure maximum flexibility of components to support diverse platforms while delivering patterned solutions in an agile framework.

03. Migration

As a fast-growing product team, we need to ensure all the product chains migrate to the design system and support their new feature release simultaneously.

04. Accessible

With accessibility compliance laws varying from market to market, we wanted to focus our system around the Web Content Accessibility Standards.

Token

Component

Pattern

Template

Governance and Documentation.

Documentation and governance are the keys to the success and sustainability of the system.

Working closely with the designer, content author, and development partners–we created and maintained documentation resources online, ensuring that we included our design principles, quick start guides, accessibility standards, and best practices for designing and testing.

What's next?

Looking back at the successes and the losses, we learned some valuable lessons:

  • Design systems are evergreen. They are living systems that require a dedicated team actively involved in their growth and maintenance. Facilitating adoption and cross-team buy-in is a challenge worth undertaking that ensures we all present a common design language that is familiar and consistent for anyone interacting with it.

  • Accessibility is MVP. Defining accessibility requirements and getting buy-in at all levels of the organization from the beginning will directly impact those complex feature and enhancement conversations later down the line.

  • Global needs require global collaboration. Our team was highly cognizant that the Global UX team was all based in the U.S. With the help of our international partners, our blind spots quickly came into view. Considerations around culture and language must continue to be an opportunity in our work.

While we had big plans for Rabbit Design System and its continued growth and expansion for even more potential features–the library of tools, resources, governance, and documentation is thoroughly laid out so that adoption of this system can be picked up by any team moving forward.