SWAN Collaboration Model
The success of SWAN relies on ongoing collaboration between the Design Systems Team and Product teams. The Design Systems Team ensures SWAN stays consistent, accessible, and robust. We take a structured approach, designing flexible, high-quality components and APIs. Product teams work closely with customers and their product areas. As daily SWAN users, they refine patterns and suggest improvements, helping the system grow to meet real needs.
To foster this, we have created the SWAN Collaboration Model.
The key principles of the model are:
- Start with SWAN. SWAN ensures consistency and accessibility, letting you focus on customers while reducing maintenance costs.
- Communicate early and often. Early communication gives the Design System Team more time to help, leading to better results for everyone.
- Design systems move slower than product teams. The design system focuses on stability, not innovation, ensuring users can trust SWAN through careful attention from the Design System Team.
- Not everything belongs in SWAN. SWAN is built to address common needs, not all needs. For bespoke use cases, it is better for a product team to create and own a component or pattern. In these cases, consider using Expansion Packs.
Intakes
We recommend starting a conversation with us first, but when ready, intake requests can be submitted via the Slack workflow in the #help-swan channel.
Direct contribution
Information on contributing directly to SWAN can now be found in the SWAN repo itself, in the file CONTRIBUTING.md.
Please check in with us at #help-swan before you start coding to minimize any potential merge issues.
