Meeting People Where They Work

Part 3 of Building Arbor. A series about my design-system work on Arbor at Linktree.

A design system only pays off if the right thing is also the easy thing — at the exact moment someone is making the decision. Research that lives in a doc nobody opens mid-task doesn’t change behavior. So the piece I’m proudest of after the researcher is a Figma plugin that pulled the system’s intelligence directly onto the canvas, where designers already are.

It did two jobs that mattered.

Bulk token migration

Behind the scenes, I’d remapped Arbor’s tokens in Figma to point at our canonical values and naming conventions: the unglamorous, load-bearing cleanup that makes everything downstream trustworthy. But a cleaner source of truth is worthless if migrating to it lands on every designer’s plate as a chore.

So the plugin, connected to Arbor’s MCP server through the Figma desktop bridge, could find every place a file used an off-system or outdated token value and move them onto the canonical tokens in a single sweep. Designers got the migration for free, without taking time away from actual design work.

Drift is the thing every design system quietly loses to. This closed the loop between what the tokens say and what the file actually uses.

UX writing, in place

I embedded our UX-writing skill right into the plugin, so you could select a piece of copy on the canvas and reformat it through the house voice without leaving Figma. The guidance stopped being a document you were supposed to remember and became a button you pressed.

That’s a small change with a large effect. The distance between “we have a voice guide” and “the voice guide is applied” is exactly the distance most guidance never travels. Collapsing it to a single click is how a standard actually becomes the default.

The through-line

The instinct here is the same as the researcher: take the system’s knowledge — the tokens, the voice, the decisions — and deliver it at the point of use, in the tool the person is already holding, instead of asking them to go find it.

Which begs a question. I now had a research corpus, a set of design tokens, component specs, and a plugin. Four sources of truth, four places to know to go look. The next post is about what tied them into one.