Design System

Goal: At a large enterprise company, we wanted to increase the speed of product iterations by growing a design system, while improving consistency and quality.

My roles

• Research
• High-fidelity design
• Evangelist to UX adopters
• Collaborator with our React engineers

Methods

• Hands-on design of the component library using design tools
• Surveys of our dealership end users
• Secondary research of system fundamentals, leveraging and improving existing UI patterns
• Writing guidelines, recommendations, and success stories

Additional context

• Full-time dedication to an enterprise design system freed me to focus deeply on fundamentals including accessibility, data density, UX writing, and component-specific patterns
• I researched and wrote usage guidelines for system components, in addition to helping maintain the design library
• Everything was made available to engineers in React code
• Working with dozens of UX designers across 5 company divisions, I saw how the system was applied successfully, and where to improve, and wrote case studies to highlight the real-world problems being solved

Results

• By 2020, the system had been used by over 300 projects across 5 business units
• The product suite had become noticeably more consistent, as noted by stakeholders and our business users
• Designers came to rely on the system to solve the most common problems, freeing their resources to innovate