Grand One is Finland’s largest and most significant competition for digital media services, designs and campaigns. It includes 18 categories that vary from Best Digital Service to Best Usage of Data. I was delighted to be on board as a member of the jury for the Best Design System, a new category which was in the Grand one for the first time. The other jury members in this category were long-time Design System professionals whose experience it was easy to trust, thank you Ariel Salminen, Piia Alavesa, and Lauri Kieksi.
The companies behind the competing Design Systems covered a wide range of industries and a nice variety of company sizes as well. It’s wonderful that the benefits of Desing Systems have been taken into use in many different environments. Pleasingly, there was also a good number of different consultancy companies together with in-house teams behind the competing systems.
The competing Design Systems were displayed with sites done for the Grand One. Additionally, some of the Design Systems had broad open-source documentation, designs and code available. Also, some of the systems in the competition offered view-only access to their files in general, for example, in Figma. In the evaluation, the focus was on user experience, the clarity of implementation, maintainability, the quality of the documentation and user interface, and the benefits achieved with the Design System.
Efficiency, scalability and accessibility
It was a privilege to be able to see all the well-grafted materials, and genuinely happy about the transparency companies have. It’s very valuable to focus on thinking about the different strategies and purposes systems have. It was also a great learning experience to dig in deep with systems since there are so many ways a Design System can enhance efficiency, user experience, and accessibility. Also, there are multiple directions that Design Systems can grow into, whether it be in next-level scalability, data and analytics, or automation, the sky is the limit.
Before the joint jury evening, we had all evaluated the Design Systems in three aspects of strategy, implementation and results. Filling an excel sheet when doing evaluation was time-consuming with so much material from all the competitors. But it was delightful to see that even with our differences in the pre-evaluation among the jury members, there was a clear pattern in the results. The winner and the other shortlisted Design Systems had a lead also in the original evaluation points compared to the rest.
All of the Design systems in the competition were at a good level, even though some of them had started the building phase only less than a year ago. I was pleased to see that nearly all of them emphasised accessibility and the benefits a Design System can bring to that. Somehow disappointing was still to see the narrow view of humans in the pictures within the systems. More male-oriented products/services had quite often only white males in the pictures and services consumed more by females had only white females in the pictures. This isn’t the representation of Finland or of the customers of the services either.
Many of the competing Design Systems had catching slogans and visual ways of telling the main purpose. Strategy, drivers, and benefits were explained, and the technology stack was opened up in detail. Amongst the competitors most used on the design side were Figma, in the documentation ZeroHight and Storybook, and React and CSS in code. Also, it was delightful that some of the systems had listed the names of the people who were behind the development of the system.
Grand one brings new people together every year and inspires the entire industry to develop. People were such a source of energy and joy, and this kind of collaboration will definitely pay off in every participating company. I know that I gained a lot for the benefit of the Elisa Design System (EDS) as well. At Elisa, Design System work has been done for a long time, the past year led by PO Kristofer Pasanen. One focus has been to build stronger cooperation and contributor models for both designers and developers. As with many development projects, the best progress is made when we talk a lot together about what good looks and feels like. Accessibility is in a central role also in EDS, and next, we’ll focus with the team on enhancing the developer experience, so that it is taken into use even more for the benefit of the customers.
With Grand One competitors, it was great to see the value of the Design Systems to business, design and development. A Design System itself is an example of a solution that only gets better with collaboration and the joint effort of thinking from diverse perspectives. The Grand One finalists will be public on the 9th of March and the Grand One Gala is on the 30th of March. Best of luck to all participants in different categories, looking forward to hearing about the great innovations of Finnish digital expertise!
Photo by Paavo Pykäläinen
Tickets to Grand One Gala can be bought here.
Small experiments and inspiration 