The Belief

I've believed a real docsite was foundational to a design system since the beginning. For a long time, I wouldn't call what we had a "real" design system without one.

HDS never had one. It grew out of 10% of my time, then 50%, then a rotating cast of engineers trying to operationalize a concept I'd sold before there was any real infrastructure behind it. Engineers defaulted to Storybook and Confluence, tools they already knew. Designers worked straight out of the Figma UI kits. I never trusted Confluence or SharePoint for this kind of thing. In my experience, that's where documentation goes to die, written once and never read again.

I wanted something closer to Carbon's docsite. It wasn't in the budget. Southwest was navigating activist investor pressure at the time, and design wasn't high on my boss's list. So the workaround was keeping guidance embedded directly in the UI kits, next to the components themselves. That held for a while. But it doesn't scale, it bloats the system it's supposed to support, and it goes stale the moment anything changes. There was zero automation behind any of it.