Laying the foundation
Team
2 designers
Duration
6 months
My role
UX-UI designer: wireframing, visual design, documentation
Platform
Website
The enterprise tool caters to a diverse clientele with the help of a harmonious partnership between its people and technologies. In order to deliver top-grade solutions to clients, several platforms are leveraged that specialize in certain functions. With this vast suite of products comes the challenge to make them all look homogenous and part of a family.
Overview
The vast suite of products have very little consistency between them. Users face limitations in their performance due to relearning unfamiliar mental models for navigation and interaction. From this gap stemmed the need for a design system.
Establishing a design system made the most sense to allow for scalability, efficiency and consistency across all products. The design system would also be the basis of any new product that would be built in the future, and bring about harmony and an improved user experience for the existing products.
Since there are multiple teams working on each of these products, oftentimes designers and developers work in silos. There is lack of communication between the pods which leads to duplication of work and inconsistency. A centralized design system will create a unified language within cross-functional teams and speed up the design process to replicate quickly at scale.
The need for a design system
Popsicle Design System
The Popsicle Design System is a collaboration model at heart. With so many diverse products, markets and users, there has to be a way for designers to create in tandem, to bring innovation and cohesion to the table.
The design system aimed to be collaborative, modular and flexible. It was a distributed effort and every designer and developer was encouraged to contribute.
Impact
Once the design system was established, we sat down with the design teams of each product, onboarding and helping them align their product as per the design system fundamentals. We worked on 12 products in total, guiding the design teams all the way while also managing the design system with the new additions.