To provide a bit of context, I think it’s valuable to have a rough idea on where I’m currently working. I’m part of a large scale company with a reasonably sized tech department. The tech department consists of 400+ individuals and we favour to do a lot of developments in house if we can. Our main focus is e-commerce and the solutions within the supply chain (think about distribution, stock optimisation, delivery and whatnot).

Since a couple of years, I’ve been invested in the component library we’ve built over the years and I gave talks on our organisational efforts surrounding the maintenance and developments. Within that capacity, I was able to share my story and chat with lots of peers from different types of organisations, but similar active topics. During those chats, the more people I talked to, the more I discovered patterns emerging. My attempts to structure these patterns have led to a model I came up with to capture Design System Maturity. Disclaimer: This is a work in progress and may be subject to change!

This article is inspired by the BBC produces series on nature, with a particular episode dealing with the wildebeest migration. The series was presented by Sir David Attenborough, and I will try and channel his spirit in this article. I have fond memories of these sort of documentaries, watching them together with my father. Those were simpler times.

I’ve used this theme and contents in talks that I gave with a similar title. Note this article details the approach that works best for us at Jumbo Supermarkten. It might not be the best in your situation, so treat its contents as inspirational.

I work at Jumbo Supermarkten in software engineering. At Jumbo we have a big tech department (affectionately called the Jumbo Tech Campus, or JTC) where we work on all of our digital products: from eCommerce and planning applications to AI driven models for stocking and inventory. I'm going to focus mostly on the eCommerce branch, since this is where we can make a big impact on our customer experience.

For our tech stack: we have an eCommerce engine which is enriched by (micro) applications and components built in Vue.js and Nuxt.js. There are multiple teams working on fulfilling the eCommerce goals and in order to deliver user interfaces as effectively as possible, we've built a component library that (in general, but we'll get to that) follows the designs and design system.

I work for a large grocery chain in the Netherlands. We do ecommerce on a national scale: facilitating the ordering and delivery of groceries in the Netherlands. With a large organisation, it any change is not without effort and extensive investment.

During 2021, an investigation conducted by level-level.com signalled that they were only able to complete 55% of steps from their use case using keyboard and/or screen reader. This meant they were unable to place an order!