Migrating to zeroheight
Brienne Wong
If you’re migrating to zeroheight from a bespoke solution or another product, we recommend these strategies for rebuilding your design system. Every team is different, and there’s no right way to complete a content migration. Read on about our recommendations, and you can decide what’s best for your team.
Lift-and-shift approach
In the lift and shift approach, you would move your current design system to zeroheight without changing the information architecture or workflows. This method can be a fast, cost-effective solution to migrate everything without disrupting workflows.
If you choose this approach, dividing and conquering the work will be the best for migration. Assign ownership to each team member to migrate the content. Communication is key to a successful migration! Tag teammates with comments to keep communication clear throughout the completion process.
Review-and-rebuild approach
Your team would review your existing content before migrating over using the review and rebuild approach. If you decide to check beforehand, break up the work into chunks and set aside time to review what you would migrate, change, and update. After determining the final scope, divide and conquer the tasks.
Set a realistic goal for migrating and rebuilding your design system site. It’ll help to focus on what content should get migrated first. Sometimes, people will migrate over the most referenced components first. Others will start with the fundamental components to ensure a foundation for the design system.
If you need to migrate in a few weeks and you have the resources to do so, you’ll meet daily to move at a quicker pace. A weekly review with your team can achieve the same goal if you have more time or fewer resources to complete your migration.
Collaborating through comments will be vital for this process as well!
If you’re evolving your toolset
It could be overwhelming if you’re migrating to zeroheight while migrating to other tools (e.g., Sketch or Adobe XD to Figma) simultaneously. We recommend prioritizing tools first, then documentation.
It’s more manageable to transition to the new tool (e.g., make the components) within the design system team first. You can update and migrate your documentation based on the work done and then onboard the rest of the design team to use the tool. Ideally, you’ll want to prepare everything to make the change run smoothly for the whole design team.
You can sync designs from Figma, Sketch, Adobe XD, Abstract, and Zeplin with zeroheight!
Leverage zeroheight’s built-in features
Once the migration process is complete, you can leverage zeroheight’s features to get your design system up and running! Here’s a list of features that can streamline the work:
Designs and code
- Create anatomy diagrams of your components
- Sync Figma descriptions and component properties
- Embed your Storybook or use live previews and code snippets
- Manage design tokens using tokens 2.0
Collaboration
- Comment on text and blocks
- Use tables to communicate component status, backlog, or roadmap
- Add status tags to display the readiness of your pages
- Use callout blocks to promote important information
- Sync pages from styleguides if you have many products and brands. This is for Enterprise plans only.
- Use releases to publish updates and save your work as you go
Final note
Again, there’s no one size fits all approach to migrating your design system. Each team has different needs and goals for its design systems.
According to the design system efficiency curve, the curve drops in the beginning as your team builds the design system but will exceed standard productivity once you implement your system. This is expected, and the time it will take to rebuild depends on your resources and approach.
Migrations can be tedious, but zeroheight’s features can help your team launch your design system quickly and efficiently. 😄