Overview

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Microsoft’s Fluent Design System is a comprehensive collection of reusable React components, design tokens, and utilities designed to build adaptive, accessible, and visually compelling web applications. Fluent is integral to Microsoft’s digital product experiences across platforms such as Microsoft 365 (M365), Dynamics 365 (D365), and is available to external customers through GitHub.

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Problem to solve

With more teams onboarded into the design system, Fluent faced scaling challenges: the backlog grew rapidly, and the need for new components and variations became increasingly pressing. Clear governance and contribution systems were essential to manage these requests effectively.

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Governance: Defined internal guidelines for processes that facilitated efficient management, enabling designers and developers to work together harmoniously. These governance models covered areas like auditing existing components, gathering requirements for new components, and ensuring alignment between stakeholders across design and engineering.

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Component Auditing: Audits were conducted either horizontally (evaluating controls across all scenarios) or vertically (evaluating all controls in a particular scenario) to assess gaps in the design system and ensure consistency across different products.

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My Contribution

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As a Lead Design Technologist on the Fluent Design v-team, I collaborated with UX designers, engineers, and product managers to deliver scalable and cohesive design solutions across M365 and D365. My role spanned across several core areas:

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Component Creation & Maintenance: I led the creation of 10+ components and contributed to over 30 components in the Fluent ecosystem across Figma, React, and Storybook. This involved designing and coding components in TypeScript and ReactJS, as well as documenting them for easy adoption.

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Popover in Fluent Design System

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This component is an example of a component I led end-to-end. I designed the popover as a small, non-intrusive element that provides extra information when users interact with components. It supports both text and interactive content and is fully customizable in size, position, and style. It fits seamlessly into any layout without disrupting the user experience.

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Theming in Practice

I implemented custom dark themes for Fluent components, ensuring seamless transitions between light and dark modes. This included mapping design tokens and ensuring system-wide accessibility, color contrast, and consistency.

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Fluent Theme Designer Tool: allows users to create custom themes by adjusting key color values and settings like hue torsion and vibrancy. It provides a step-by-step process to generate a 16-color palette that ensures contrast and accessibility compliance across Fluent components. Real-time previews and easy export options made customization intuitive and efficient.

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Dark theme in Fluent Design system and SharePoint  

By leveraging Fluent’s design tokens, this theme provides consistent and accessible color contrast across all components, ensuring that the interface remains clear and user-friendly regardless of the mode.

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This dark theme seamlessly integrates across multiple Microsoft products, making it easier for users to interact with content while maintaining visual harmony.

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The dark theme implementation in Fluent Design and SharePoint elevates the user experience by offering a sleek, modern look that enhances focus and readability, especially in low-light environments

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Feedback & Iteration

During the development of the custom dark theme for SharePoint, we received feedback from internal accessibility testers who identified areas where the color contrast in dark mode didn’t meet WCAG standards. Based on this feedback, I initiated a series of accessibility reviews with the design and engineering teams to ensure that color tokens in dark mode were properly mapped.

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After several iterations and user feedback loops, we reduced contrast-related bugs by 50% and improved the overall accessibility score of the SharePoint dark mode experience. The feedback process also helped standardize theming principles across M365 products, reducing future inconsistencies.

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Managing component contribution

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I actively engaged in triaging contributions from third-party partners and external contributors via GitHub. This involved assessing issues, guiding new contributions, and managing the backlog to prioritize features that aligned with Fluent’s long-term vision.

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Documentation: Involved in creating and updating comprehensive documentation that provided clarity on component use cases, properties, and integration best practices. Documentation served as a critical resource for both internal teams and external contributors.

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‍Playground & Storybook: I worked on expanding the component playground in Storybook to ensure that developers could easily interact with and visualize Fluent components, especially in dark mode configurations that I helped implement.

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Overall Impact

• Component Adoption: The components I developed and maintained were adopted by 15+ internal teams across Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365. This adoption reduced the time spent on building new components by an average of 30%, accelerating product release cycles.4

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• Governance Efficiency: After the governance and contribution model I implemented, the average turnaround time for component approval and integration into the design system decreased by 20%. This allowed the backlog to be managed more effectively and reduced redundant requests.

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• One of my key contributions was mediating between the design and engineering teams to ensure the component specifications in Figma matched the implementation in React and Storybook. I facilitated weekly design reviews to maintain consistency and address any discrepancies early on.

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Challenges & Solutions:

• Challenge: One of the recurring issues we faced was the inconsistent application of theming across Microsoft 365, particularly when switching between light and dark modes. This resulted in accessibility issues, such as poor color contrast in high-contrast mode.

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• Solution: To address this, I worked with the design tokens team to redefine Fluent’s OS-level theming support, ensuring that all components maintained appropriate contrast ratios. I also implemented a real-time theming toggle in the Storybook playground, allowing designers and developers to easily test components in both light and dark modes before pushing them live.

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Lessons learned

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Design systems are about empowerment rather than enforcement

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I’ll start with, there is no one size fits all solution with design systems. However, clearly defined design principles help create resources, and accelerates those using the system to work confidently. Incorporating design system governance and contribution models earlier helps guide the design system team for scale, and invites cross-team feedback and collaboration sooner.

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As part of the OneDrive SharePoint Team, I worked closely with UX Designers, Engineers, and Product Managers across different verticals to ensure that Fluent Design components aligned with business needs and technical constraints. This required leading regular cross-functional workshops where we gathered insights, prioritized backlog items, and resolved roadblocks.

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