Building and Scaling a Design System

In this case study, I aim to share my journey in building and maintaining a design system for a Big4 company. This system is used by various global products within the company, while empowering multiple design and development teams with a set of reusable components.

Challenge

The company aimed to expand its product portfolio across multiple divisions and provide its employees with cutting-edge solutions to improve workflow efficiency. However, within one division, different teams of developers and designers were creating systems independently. This led to functionally connected products having different appearances and behaviors, which posed a usability challenge for users.

My role

I have been responsible for studying over 10 digital products in depth to analyze their functionality, determine similarities and differences, and come to conclusions about what exactly we need to build in the library to cover as many cases as possible. One of the things I've been working on is creating flexible and highly customizable components that can be used by designers in a team to create meaningful interactions and interfaces.

Team

I worked with engineers, stakeholders, product owners and design colleagues ensuring effective communication and collaboration.

The approach

To achieve a fully comprehensive design system, I should incorporate three essential elements. These serve as the fundamental pillars for crafting an effective design system:

1. A coherent design language
2. A comprehensive component library
3. Thorough documentation
   

Project success

The design system became a comprehensive mix of style guides, design components, patterns, code elements, and thorough documentation. It is a powerful resource for designers to create rapid prototypes to validate early design solutions, a source for redesigning existing products, and a foundation for developing new products. It is a tool that helps ensure consistency across multiple digital products within the division's solutions.