In this Performance Commerce Minute, Jared Hochradel, VP of Customer Experience, dives into why having a strong design system is key in the age of AI. He highlights how they create a shared foundation, keep experiences consistent, and give teams the flexibility to let AI innovate.
Watch the full video below:
Transcript:
00:00 – 00:39
You know, at Smith, we’ve been talking about the importance of design systems for a long time. We have lots of IP that we’ve built out over the years that have helped us as we make large scale ecommerce applications and complex commerce experiences across web, mobile apps, and that kind of thing for consumers and also businesses. So different use cases and different complexities with that.
00:11 – 01:34
What we’ve done is abstracted a lot of these decisions that are commonly made on the types of projects that we work on and built out a system of variables that allow us to gracefully treat design as data and present this as even JSON objects. And all this hard work that we’ve been doing, best practices of building out design systems, building out components that are well structured that use those lower level components and tokens in their architecture, and really sophisticated instructions and properties that get exposed to help us indicate the different ways that that component might behave in an interface.
01:34 – 01:53
And these decisions scale and combine when we think about what’s been coined as atomic design. And as these decisions start to layer and we build bigger and bigger objects and how those objects are reused within our interfaces and our products.
01:53 – 02:30
You know, this is kind of the future that we’ve been seeing. By the time we post this, it’s probably outdated, right? But the world is moving fast. And the point is you need to get the fundamentals right before you scale it out to AI because AI knows nothing without the rules that you give it. And the more rules you give it, the more consistent it can create the things that you want to create based on whatever conditions, whether it’s your brand, how you want to sound, how you wanna look, how you wanna feel. So, there’s a lot of power in it.
02:30 – 02:46
And it’s allowed us to move at crazy speed and we’re having a lot of fun with it and seeing some really practical applications of how it can really help us drive more potential to performance.