Building Uber a $6 million table component – Lisa Mahapatra
When I joined Uber in 2019, the Base Web design system, only about a year old at the time, had a solitary table component that was one of the worst tables I’d ever seen in my life. It was a fairly simple grid with neither row nor column delineation, and had no functionality past the ability to display data in a columnar grid that lived in a window with scroll enabled. I wish I could show y’all, but Uber’s design system has since sunset that specific component.
I’d been hired to work on Uber’s Core Data Platform tools, and within my first few months I saw at least 7 different data tables, none using the aforementioned useless table component from the design system. They were all kinda okayish, designed by engineers, and custom built to support the specific usecase of the tool it lived in.
I was so irritated by this stupid, useless table component I wrote up a manifesto on why it sucked and sent it to Jeff Jura, Uber’s head of Design Systems at the time. He asked if I’d like to redesign the table, and offered the time of a single design engineer on the Design System engineering team.
